sub-select contains a join alias reference that expands into an expression
containing another sub-select. Per yesterday's report from Merlin Moncure
and subsequent off-list investigation.
Back-patch to 7.4. Older versions didn't attempt to flatten sub-selects in
ways that would trigger this problem.
Stefan Kaltenbrunner. The most reasonable behavior (at least for the near
term) seems to be to ignore the PlaceHolderVar and examine its argument
instead. In support of this, change the API of pull_var_clause() to allow
callers to request recursion into PlaceHolderVars. Currently
estimate_num_groups() is the only customer for that behavior, but where
there's one there may be others.
making pull_up_sublinks() construct a full-blown JoinExpr tree representation
of IN/EXISTS SubLinks that it is able to convert to semi or anti joins.
This makes pull_up_sublinks() a shade more complex, but the gain in semantic
clarity is worth it. I still have more to do in this area to address the
previously-discussed problems, but this commit in itself fixes at least one
bug in HEAD, as shown by added regression test case.
until vars are distributed to rels during query_planner() startup. We don't
really need it before that, and not building it early has some advantages.
First, we don't need to put it through the various preprocessing steps, which
saves some cycles and eliminates the need for a number of routines to support
PlaceHolderInfo nodes at all. Second, this means one less unused plan for any
sub-SELECT appearing in a placeholder's expression, since we don't build
placeholder_list until after sublink expansion is complete.
that represent some expression that we desire to compute below the top level
of the plan, and then let that value "bubble up" as though it were a plain
Var (ie, a column value).
The immediate application is to allow sub-selects to be flattened even when
they are below an outer join and have non-nullable output expressions.
Formerly we couldn't flatten because such an expression wouldn't properly
go to NULL when evaluated above the outer join. Now, we wrap it in a
PlaceHolderVar and arrange for the actual evaluation to occur below the outer
join. When the resulting Var bubbles up through the join, it will be set to
NULL if necessary, yielding the correct results. This fixes a planner
limitation that's existed since 7.1.
In future we might want to use this mechanism to re-introduce some form of
Hellerstein's "expensive functions" optimization, ie place the evaluation of
an expensive function at the most suitable point in the plan tree.
the column alias names of the RTE referenced by the Var to the RowExpr.
This is needed to allow ruleutils.c to correctly deparse FieldSelect nodes
referencing such a construct. Per my recent bug report.
Adding a field to RowExpr forces initdb (because of stored rules changes)
so this solution is not back-patchable; which is unfortunate because 8.2
and 8.3 have this issue. But it only affects EXPLAIN for some pretty odd
corner cases, so we can probably live without a solution for the back
branches.
most node types used in expression trees (both before and after parse
analysis). This allows us to place an error cursor in many situations
where we formerly could not, because the information wasn't available
beyond the very first level of parse analysis. There's a fair amount
of work still to be done to persuade individual ereport() calls to actually
include an error location, but this gets the initdb-forcing part of the
work out of the way; and the situation is already markedly better than
before for complaints about unimplementable implicit casts, such as
CASE and UNION constructs with incompatible alternative data types.
Per my proposal of a few days ago.
into nodes/nodeFuncs, so as to reduce wanton cross-subsystem #includes inside
the backend. There's probably more that should be done along this line,
but this is a start anyway.
subqueries into the same thing you'd have gotten from IN (except always with
unknownEqFalse = true, so as to get the proper semantics for an EXISTS).
I believe this fixes the last case within CVS HEAD in which an EXISTS could
give worse performance than an equivalent IN subquery.
The tricky part of this is that if the upper query probes the EXISTS for only
a few rows, the hashing implementation can actually be worse than the default,
and therefore we need to make a cost-based decision about which way to use.
But at the time when the planner generates plans for subqueries, it doesn't
really know how many times the subquery will be executed. The least invasive
solution seems to be to generate both plans and postpone the choice until
execution. Therefore, in a query that has been optimized this way, EXPLAIN
will show two subplans for the EXISTS, of which only one will actually get
executed.
There is a lot more that could be done based on this infrastructure: in
particular it's interesting to consider switching to the hash plan if we start
out using the non-hashed plan but find a lot more upper rows going by than we
expected. I have therefore left some minor inefficiencies in place, such as
initializing both subplans even though we will currently only use one.
the old JOIN_IN code, but antijoins are new functionality.) Teach the planner
to convert appropriate EXISTS and NOT EXISTS subqueries into semi and anti
joins respectively. Also, LEFT JOINs with suitable upper-level IS NULL
filters are recognized as being anti joins. Unify the InClauseInfo and
OuterJoinInfo infrastructure into "SpecialJoinInfo". With that change,
it becomes possible to associate a SpecialJoinInfo with every join attempt,
which permits some cleanup of join selectivity estimation. That needs to be
taken much further than this patch does, but the next step is to change the
API for oprjoin selectivity functions, which seems like material for a
separate patch. So for the moment the output size estimates for semi and
especially anti joins are quite bogus.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version. Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.
In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.
Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
Along the way, allow FOR UPDATE in non-WITH-HOLD cursors; there may once
have been a reason to disallow that, but it seems to work now, and it's
really rather necessary if you want to select a row via a cursor and then
update it in a concurrent-safe fashion.
Original patch by Arul Shaji, rather heavily editorialized by Tom Lane.
a new PlannerInfo struct, which is passed around instead of the bare
Query in all the planning code. This commit is essentially just a
code-beautification exercise, but it does open the door to making
larger changes to the planner data structures without having to muck
with the widely-known Query struct.
performance problem pointed out by phil@vodafone: to wit, we were
spending O(N^2) time to check dropped-ness in an N-deep join tree,
even in the case where the tree was freshly constructed and couldn't
possibly mention any dropped columns. Instead of recursing in
get_rte_attribute_is_dropped(), change the data structure definition:
the joinaliasvars list of a JOIN RTE must have a NULL Const instead
of a Var at any position that references a now-dropped column. This
costs nothing during normal parse-rewrite-plan path, and instead we
have a linear-time update to make when loading a stored rule that
might contain now-dropped columns. While at it, move the responsibility
for acquring locks on relations referenced by rules into this separate
function (which I therefore chose to call AcquireRewriteLocks).
This saves effort --- namely, duplicated lock grabs in parser and rewriter
--- in the normal path at a cost of one extra non-locked heap_open()
in the stored-rule path; seems a good tradeoff. A fringe benefit is
that it is now *much* clearer that we acquire lock on relations referenced
in rules before we make any rewriter decisions based on their properties.
(I don't know of any bug of that ilk, but it wasn't exactly clear before.)
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
presence of dropped columns. Document the already-presumed fact that
eref aliases in relation RTEs are supposed to have entries for dropped
columns; cause the user alias structs to have such entries too, so that
there's always a one-to-one mapping to the underlying physical attnums.
Adjust expandRTE() and related code to handle the case where a column
that is part of a JOIN has been dropped. Generalize expandRTE()'s API
so that it can be used in a couple of places that formerly rolled their
own implementation of the same logic. Fix ruleutils.c to suppress
display of aliases for columns that were dropped since the rule was made.
In the past, we used a 'Lispy' linked list implementation: a "list" was
merely a pointer to the head node of the list. The problem with that
design is that it makes lappend() and length() linear time. This patch
fixes that problem (and others) by maintaining a count of the list
length and a pointer to the tail node along with each head node pointer.
A "list" is now a pointer to a structure containing some meta-data
about the list; the head and tail pointers in that structure refer
to ListCell structures that maintain the actual linked list of nodes.
The function names of the list API have also been changed to, I hope,
be more logically consistent. By default, the old function names are
still available; they will be disabled-by-default once the rest of
the tree has been updated to use the new API names.
rather than allowing them only in a few special cases as before. In
particular you can now pass a ROW() construct to a function that accepts
a rowtype parameter. Internal generation of RowExprs fixes a number of
corner cases that used to not work very well, such as referencing the
whole-row result of a JOIN or subquery. This represents a further step in
the work I started a month or so back to make rowtype values into
first-class citizens.
extensions to support our historical behavior. An aggregate belongs
to the closest query level of any of the variables in its argument,
or the current query level if there are no variables (e.g., COUNT(*)).
The implementation involves adding an agglevelsup field to Aggref,
and treating outer aggregates like outer variables at planning time.
introducing new 'FastList' list-construction subroutines to use in
hot spots. This avoids the O(N^2) behavior of repeated lappend's
by keeping a tail pointer, while not changing behavior by reversing
list order as the lcons() method would do.
There are two implementation techniques: the executor understands a new
JOIN_IN jointype, which emits at most one matching row per left-hand row,
or the result of the IN's sub-select can be fed through a DISTINCT filter
and then joined as an ordinary relation.
Along the way, some minor code cleanup in the optimizer; notably, break
out most of the jointree-rearrangement preprocessing in planner.c and
put it in a new file prep/prepjointree.c.
simplify callers. It turns out the common case is that the caller
does want to recurse into sub-queries, so push support for that into
these subroutines.
containing a volatile function), rather than only on 'Var = Var' clauses
as before. This makes it practical to do flatten_join_alias_vars at the
start of planning, which in turn eliminates a bunch of klugery inside the
planner to deal with alias vars. As a free side effect, we now detect
implied equality of non-Var expressions; for example in
SELECT ... WHERE a.x = b.y and b.y = 42
we will deduce a.x = 42 and use that as a restriction qual on a. Also,
we can remove the restriction introduced 12/5/02 to prevent pullup of
subqueries whose targetlists contain sublinks.
Still TODO: make statistical estimation routines in selfuncs.c and costsize.c
smarter about expressions that are more complex than plain Vars. The need
for this is considerably greater now that we have to be able to estimate
the suitability of merge and hash join techniques on such expressions.
Simplify SubLink by storing just a List of operator OIDs, instead of
a list of incomplete OpExprs --- that was a bizarre and bulky choice,
with no redeeming social value since we have to build new OpExprs
anyway when forming the plan tree.
in the planned representation of a subplan at all any more, only SubPlan.
This means subselect.c doesn't scribble on its input anymore, which seems
like a good thing; and there are no longer three different possible
interpretations of a SubLink. Simplify node naming and improve comments
in primnodes.h. No change to stored rules, though.
so that all executable expression nodes inherit from a common supertype
Expr. This is somewhat of an exercise in code purity rather than any
real functional advance, but getting rid of the extra Oper or Func node
formerly used in each operator or function call should provide at least
a little space and speed improvement.
initdb forced by changes in stored-rules representation.
that are explicitly JOINed are not considered dependencies unless they
are actually used in the query: mere presence in the joinaliasvars
list of a JOIN RTE doesn't count as being used. The patch touches
a number of files because I needed to generalize the API of
query_tree_walker to support an additional flag bit, but the changes
are otherwise quite small.