| PostgreSQL 7.4.13 Documentation | ||||
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SQL UNION constructs must match up possibly dissimilar types to become a single result set. The resolution algorithm is applied separately to each output column of a union query. The INTERSECT and EXCEPT constructs resolve dissimilar types in the same way as UNION. The CASE and ARRAY constructs use the identical algorithm to match up their component expressions and select a result data type.
UNION, CASE, and ARRAY Type Resolution
If all inputs are of type unknown, resolve as type text (the preferred type of the string category)nand compilations are normally done automatically using the makefiles shipped with the PostgreSQL source distribution.
A detailed description of yacc or the grammar rules given in gram.y would be beyond the scope of this paper. There are many books and documents dealing with lex and yacc. You should be familiar with yacc before you start to study the grammar given in gram.y otherwise you won't understand what happens there.
The parser stage creates a parse tree using only fixed rules about the syntactic structure of SQL. It does not make any lookups in the system catalogs, so there is no possibility to understand the detailed semantics of the requested operations. After the parser completes, the transformation process takes the tree handed back by the parser as input and does the semantic interpretation needed to understand which tables, functions, and operators are referenced by the query. The data structure that is built to represent this information is called the query tree.
The reason for separating raw parsing from semantic analysis is that system catalog lookups can only be done within a transaction, and we do not wish to start a transaction immediately upon receiving a query string. The raw parsing stage is sufficient to identify the transaction control commands (BEGIN, ROLLBACK, etc), and these can then be correctly executed without any further analysis. Once we know that we are dealing with an actual query (such as SELECT or UPDATE), it is okay to start a transaction if we're not already in one. Only then can the transformation process be invoked.
The query tree created by the transformation process is structurally similar to the raw parse tree in most places, but it has many differences in detail. For example, a FuncCall node in the parse tree represen