Regression Analysis

“Failed” tests may have failed due to slightly different error messages, math libraries, or output formatting. "Failures" of this type do not indicate a problem with Postgres.

For a i686/Linux-ELF platform, no tests failed since this is the v6.2.1 regression testing reference platform.

For the SPARC/Linux-ELF platform, using the 970525 beta version of Postgres v6.2 the following tests "failed": float8 and geometry "failed" due to minor precision differences in floating point numbers. select_views produces massively different output, but the differences are due to minor floating point differences.

Conclusion? If you do see failures, try to understand the nature of the differences and then decide if those differences will affect your intended use of Postgres. However, keep in mind that this is likely to be the most solid release of Postgres to date, incorporating many bug fixes from v6.1, and that previous versions of Postgres have been in use successfully for some time now.

Comparing expected/actual output

The results are in files in the ./results directory. These results can be compared with results in the ./expected directory using 'diff'. The files might not compare exactly. The following paragraphs attempt to explain the differences.

Error message differences

Some of the regression tests involve intentional invalid input values. Error messages can come from either the Postgres code or from the host platform system routines. In the latter case, the messages may vary between platforms, but should reflect similar information. These differences in messages will result in a "failed" regression test which can be validated by inspection.

OID differences

There are several places where PostgreSQL OID (object identifiers) appear in 'regress.out'. OID's are unique 32-bit integers which are generated by the PostgreSQL backend whenever a table row is inserted or updated. If you run the regression test on a non-virgin database or run it multiple times, the OID's reported will have different values. The following SQL statements in 'misc.out' have shown this behavior: QUERY: SELECT user_relns() AS user_relns ORDER BY user_relns; The 'a,523676' row is composed from an OID.

Date and time differences

On many supported platforms, you can force PostgreSQL to believe that it is running in the same time zone as Berkeley, California. See details in the section on how to run the regression tests. If you do not explicitly set your time zone environment to PST8PDT, then most of the date and time results will reflect your local time zone and will fail the regression testing. There appears to be some systems which do not accept the recommended syntax for explicitly setting the local time zone rules. Some systems using the public domain time zone package exhibit minor problems with pre-1970 PDT times, representing them in PST instead.

Floating point differences

Some of the tests involve computing 64-bit (float8) number from table columns. Differences in results involving mathematical functions of float8 columns have been observed. These differences occur where different operating systems are used on the same platform ie: BSDI and SOLARIS on Intel/86, and where the same operating system is used used on different platforms, ie: SOLARIS on SPARC and Intel/86. Human eyeball comparison is needed to determine the real significance of these differences which are usually 10 places to the right of the decimal point. Some systems signal errors from pow() and exp() differently from the mechanism expected by the current Postgres code.

Polygon differences

Several of the tests involve operations on geographic date about the Oakland/Berkley CA street map. The map data is expressed as polygons whose vertices are represented as pairs of float8 numbers (decimal latitude and longitude). Initially, some tables are created and loaded with geographic data, then some views are created which join two tables using the polygon intersection operator (##), then a select is done on the view. When comparing the results from different platforms, differences occur in the 2nd or 3rd place to the right of the decimal point. The SQL statements where these problems occur are the folowing:

    QUERY: SELECT * from street;
    QUERY: SELECT * from iexit;

Random differences

There is at least one test case in random.out which is intended to produce random results. This causes random to fail the regression testing. Typing

    diff results/random.out expected/random.out

should produce only one or a few lines of differences for this reason, but other floating point differences on dissimilar architectures might cause many more differences. See the release notes below.

The “expected” files

The ./expected/*.out files were adapted from the original monolithic expected.input file provided by Jolly Chen et al. Newer versions of these files generated on various development machines have been substituted after careful (?) inspection. Many of the development machines are running a Unix OS variant (FreeBSD, Linux, etc) on Ix86 hardware. The original expected.input file was created on a SPARC Solaris 2.4 system using the postgres5-1.02a5.tar.gz source tree. It was compared with a file created on an I386 Solaris 2.4 system and the differences were only in the floating point polygons in the 3rd digit to the right of the decimal point. (see below) The original sample.regress.out file was from the postgres-1.01 release constructed by Jolly Chen and is included here for reference. It may have been created on a DEC ALPHA machine as the Makefile.global in the postgres-1.01 release has PORTNAME=alpha.