I wrote:
> I've marked this RFC, and will push tomorrow unless somebody wants
> to object to the loss of backwards compatibility.
And done. I noticed in some final testing that it's possible to
make this code take a long time by forcing it to backtrack a lot:
regression=# SELECT (('1' || repeat('.1', 65534))::ltree) ~ '*.*.x';
?column?
----------
f
(1 row)
Time: 54015.421 ms (00:54.015)
so I threw in a CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS(). Maybe it'd be worth trying
to optimize such cases, but I'm not sure that it'd ever matter for
real-world cases with reasonable-size label strings.
The old implementation seems to handle that particular case well,
evidently because it more-or-less folds adjacent stars together.
However, before anyone starts complaining about regressions, they
should note that it's really easy to get the old code to fail
via stack overflow:
regression=# SELECT (('1' || repeat('.1', 65534))::ltree) ~ '*.!1.*';
ERROR: stack depth limit exceeded
(That's as of five minutes ago, before that it dumped core.)
So I don't feel bad about the tradeoff. At least now we have
simple, visibly correct code that could serve as a starting
point for optimization if anyone feels the need to.
regards, tom lane