This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)
Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
so that their elements are always taken as simple expressions over the
query's input columns. It originally seemed like a good idea to make them
act exactly like GROUP BY and ORDER BY, right down to the SQL92-era behavior
of accepting output column names or numbers. However, that was not such a
great idea, for two reasons:
1. It permits circular references, as exhibited in bug #5018: the output
column could be the one containing the window function itself. (We actually
had a regression test case illustrating this, but nobody thought twice about
how confusing that would be.)
2. It doesn't seem like a good idea for, eg, "lead(foo) OVER (ORDER BY foo)"
to potentially use two completely different meanings for "foo".
Accordingly, narrow down the behavior of window clauses to use only the
SQL99-compliant interpretation that the expressions are simple expressions.
patch. This includes the ability to force the frame to cover the whole
partition, and the ability to make the frame end exactly on the current row
rather than its last ORDER BY peer. Supporting any more of the full SQL
frame-clause syntax will require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate
code, so it'll have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.