I lluminated Computing
I’ve never done this before, so it was a learning experience. Maybe my story will help some other new Postgres contributor—or anyone struggling with this technology that is central to computer science but for many day-to-day programmers seldom-used.
Back in 2018 I read lex & yacc by Doug Brown, John R. Levine, and Tony Mason (second edition published in 1992). Levine’s 2009 flex & bison would have been a more practical choice, but I liked getting some history too. Re-reading some parts of that book was very helpful. So were the bison manual and some StackOverflow questions. Now I’m working through The Dragon Book, and that would have made a great resource too. It’s easy to write some bison without going that deep, but if you get stuck it can be frustrating.
I’ve been adding syntax from SQL:2011 for application-time updates and deletes. If you have a PERIOD or range column named valid_at, you can say UPDATE t FOR PORTION OF valid_at FROM '2024-01-01' TO '2024-02-01' SET foo = bar. (For more details you can watch my talk.) The FOR PORTION OF bounds don’t have to be just literals. You could also say, for example, FROM current_time TO current_time + INTERVAL '1' HOUR.
