This patch improves handling of NULLs in textual fields in ColumnStore.
Previously empty strings were considered NULLs and it could be a problem
if data scheme allows for empty strings. It was also one of major
reasons of behavior difference between ColumnStore and other engines in
MariaDB family.
Also, this patch fixes some other bugs and incorrect behavior, for
example, incorrect comparison for "column <= ''" which evaluates to
constant True for all purposes before this patch.
The idea is relatively simple - encode prefixes of collated strings as
integers and use them to compute extents' ranges. Then we can eliminate
extents with strings.
The actual patch does have all the code there but miss one important
step: we do not keep collation index, we keep charset index. Because of
this, some of the tests in the bugfix suite fail and thus main
functionality is turned off.
The reason of this patch to be put into PR at all is that it contains
changes that made CHAR/VARCHAR columns unsigned. This change is needed in
vectorization work.
Part 1:
As part of MCOL-3776 to address synchronization issue while accessing
the fTimeZone member of the Func class, mutex locks were added to the
accessor and mutator methods. However, this slows down processing
of TIMESTAMP columns in PrimProc significantly as all threads across
all concurrently running queries would serialize on the mutex. This
is because PrimProc only has a single global object for the functor
class (class derived from Func in utils/funcexp/functor.h) for a given
function name. To fix this problem:
(1) We remove the fTimeZone as a member of the Func derived classes
(hence removing the mutexes) and instead use the fOperationType
member of the FunctionColumn class to propagate the timezone values
down to the individual functor processing functions such as
FunctionColumn::getStrVal(), FunctionColumn::getIntVal(), etc.
(2) To achieve (1), a timezone member is added to the
execplan::CalpontSystemCatalog::ColType class.
Part 2:
Several functors in the Funcexp code call dataconvert::gmtSecToMySQLTime()
and dataconvert::mySQLTimeToGmtSec() functions for conversion between seconds
since unix epoch and broken-down representation. These functions in turn call
the C library function localtime_r() which currently has a known bug of holding
a global lock via a call to __tz_convert. This significantly reduces performance
in multi-threaded applications where multiple threads concurrently call
localtime_r(). More details on the bug:
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16145
This bug in localtime_r() caused processing of the Functors in PrimProc to
slowdown significantly since a query execution causes Functors code to be
processed in a multi-threaded manner.
As a fix, we remove the calls to localtime_r() from gmtSecToMySQLTime()
and mySQLTimeToGmtSec() by performing the timezone-to-offset conversion
(done in dataconvert::timeZoneToOffset()) during the execution plan
creation in the plugin. Note that localtime_r() is only called when the
time_zone system variable is set to "SYSTEM".
This fix also required changing the timezone type from a std::string to
a long across the system.
In the FLOAT/DOUBLE to string conversions a class global string was used
to store the result. Unfortunately it is possible for an instance of
this class to be used by multiple threads of PrimProc simultaneously.
This would cause a race and data corruption or more likely a crash.
This fix passes a string object from the caller to use instead.
Functions such as reverse() that do float/double to string conversion
use printf's %g to do it. Unfortunately this adds a '+' symbol before
the exponent symbol. MariaDB doesn't do this.
This patch builds the string in a way that does not have that problem,
it resembles the way it is done elsewhere in the codebase.
