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.
null::char(3) to a simple Const node. (It already worked for non-null values,
but not when we skipped evaluation of a strict coercion function.) This
prevents loss of typmod knowledge in situations such as exhibited in bug
#3598. Unfortunately there seems no good way to fix that bug in 8.1 and 8.2,
because they simply don't carry a typmod for a plain Const node.
In passing I made all the other callers of makeNullConst supply "real" typmod
values too, though I think it probably doesn't matter anywhere else.
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM
CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the
interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation
is a bit spartan, too.
the number of rows likely to be produced by a query such as
SELECT * FROM t1 LEFT JOIN t2 USING (key) WHERE t2.key IS NULL;
What this is doing is selecting for t1 rows with no match in t2, and thus
it may produce a significant number of rows even if the t2.key table column
contains no nulls at all. 8.2 thinks the table column's null fraction is
relevant and thus may estimate no rows out, which results in terrible plans
if there are more joins above this one. A proper fix for this will involve
passing much more information about the context of a clause to the selectivity
estimator functions than we ever have. There's no time left to write such a
patch for 8.3, and it wouldn't be back-patchable into 8.2 anyway. Instead,
put in an ad-hoc test to defeat the normal table-stats-based estimation when
an IS NULL test is evaluated at an outer join, and just use a constant
estimate instead --- I went with 0.5 for lack of a better idea. This won't
catch every case but it will catch the typical ways of writing such queries,
and it seems unlikely to make things worse for other queries.
sets for outer joins, in the light of bug #3588 and additional thought and
experimentation. The original methodology was fatally flawed for nests of
more than two outer joins: it got the relationships between adjacent joins
right, but didn't always come to the right conclusions about whether a join
could be interchanged with one two or more levels below it. This was largely
caused by a mistaken idea that we should use the min_lefthand + min_righthand
sets of a sub-join as the minimum left or right input set of an upper join
when we conclude that the sub-join can't commute with the upper one. If
there's a still-lower join that the sub-join *can* commute with, this method
led us to think that that one could commute with the topmost join; which it
can't. Another problem (not directly connected to bug #3588) was that
make_outerjoininfo's processing-order-dependent method for enforcing outer
join identity #3 didn't work right: if we decided that join A could safely
commute with lower join B, we dropped all information about sub-joins under B
that join A could perhaps not safely commute with, because we removed B's
entire min_righthand from A's.
To fix, make an explicit computation of all inner join combinations that occur
below an outer join, and add to that the full syntactic relsets of any lower
outer joins that we determine it can't commute with. This method gives much
more direct enforcement of the outer join rearrangement identities, and it
turns out not to cost a lot of additional bookkeeping.
Thanks to Richard Harris for the bug report and test case.
checking whether an IS NULL/IS NOT NULL clause is implied or refuted by
a strict function. Per example from Dawid Kuroczko.
Backpatch to 8.2 since this is arguably a performance bug.
a MIN or MAX aggregate call into an indexscan: the initplan is being made at
the current query nesting level and so we shouldn't increment query_level.
Though usually harmless, this mistake could lead to bogus "plan should not
reference subplan's variable" failures on complex queries. Per bug report
from David Sanchez i Gregori.
ORDER BY <constant> as redundant. One is that this means query_planner()
has to canonicalize pathkeys even when the query jointree is empty;
the canonicalization was always a no-op in such cases before, but no more.
Also, we have to guard against thinking that a set-returning function is
"constant" for this purpose. Add a couple of regression tests for these
evidently under-tested cases. Per report from Greg Stark and subsequent
experimentation.
(which now deals only in optimizable statements), and put that code
into a new file parser/parse_utilcmd.c. This helps clarify and enforce
the design rule that utility statements shouldn't be processed during
the regular parse analysis phase; all interpretation of their meaning
should happen after they are given to ProcessUtility to execute.
(We need this because we don't retain any locks for a utility statement
that's in a plan cache, nor have any way to detect that it's stale.)
We are also able to simplify the API for parse_analyze() and related
routines, because they will now always return exactly one Query structure.
In passing, fix bug #3403 concerning trying to add a serial column to
an existing temp table (this is largely Heikki's work, but we needed
all that restructuring to make it safe).
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.
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
index key columns always have the type expected by the index's associated
operators, ie, we add RelabelType nodes when dealing with binary-compatible
index opclasses. This is needed to get varchar indexes to play nicely with
the new EquivalenceClass machinery, as per recent gripe from Josh Berkus that
CVS HEAD was failing to match a varchar index column to a constant restriction
in the query.
It seems likely that this change will allow removal of a lot of ugly ad-hoc
RelabelType-stripping that the planner has traditionally done while matching
expressions to other expressions, but I'll worry about that some other day.
inheritance child of an UPDATE/DELETE target relation can be excluded by
constraints. I had rearranged some code in set_append_rel_pathlist() to
avoid "useless" work when a child is excluded, but overdid it and left
the child with no cheapest_path entry, causing possible failure later
if the appendrel was involved in a join. Also, it seems that the dummy
plan generated by inheritance_planner() when all branches are excluded
has to be a bit less dummy now than was required in 8.2.
Per report from Jan Wieck. Add his test case to the regression tests.
and/or create plans for hypothetical situations; in particular, investigate
plans that would be generated using hypothetical indexes. This is a
heavily-rewritten version of the hooks proposed by Gurjeet Singh for his
Index Advisor project. In this formulation, the index advisor can be
entirely a loadable module instead of requiring a significant part to be
in the core backend, and plans can be generated for hypothetical indexes
without requiring the creation and rolling-back of system catalog entries.
The index advisor patch as-submitted is not compatible with these hooks,
but it needs significant work anyway due to other 8.2-to-8.3 planner
changes. With these hooks in the core backend, development of the advisor
can proceed as a pgfoundry project.
in cases where a sub-SELECT inserts a WHERE clause between two outer joins,
that clause may prevent us from re-ordering the two outer joins. The code
was considering only the joins' own ON-conditions in determining reordering
safety, which is not good enough. Add a "delay_upper_joins" flag to
OuterJoinInfo to flag that we have detected such a clause and higher-level
outer joins shouldn't be permitted to commute with this one. (This might
seem overly coarse, but given the current rules for OJ reordering, it's
sufficient AFAICT.)
The failure case is actually pretty narrow: it needs a WHERE clause within
the RHS of a left join that checks the RHS of a lower left join, but is not
strict for that RHS (else we'd have simplified the lower join to a plain
join). Even then no failure will be manifest unless the planner chooses to
rearrange the join order.
Per bug report from Adam Terrey.
cheapest-startup-cost innerjoin indexscans, and make joinpath.c consider
both of these (when different) as the inside of a nestloop join. The
original design was based on the assumption that indexscan paths always
have negligible startup cost, and so total cost is the only important
figure of merit; an assumption that's obviously broken by bitmap
indexscans. This oversight could lead to choosing poor plans in cases
where fast-start behavior is more important than total cost, such as
LIMIT and IN queries. 8.1-vintage brain fade exposed by an example from
Chuck D.
is using mark/restore but not rewind or backward-scan capability. Insert a
materialize plan node between a mergejoin and its inner child if the inner
child is a sort that is expected to spill to disk. The materialize shields
the sort from the need to do mark/restore and thereby allows it to perform
its final merge pass on-the-fly; while the materialize itself is normally
cheap since it won't spill to disk unless the number of tuples with equal
key values exceeds work_mem.
Greg Stark, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane.
more completely. The motivation for having it understand IS NULL at all was
to allow use of "foo IS NULL" as one of the subsets of a partitioning on
"foo", but as reported by Aleksander Kmetec, it wasn't really getting the job
done. Backpatch to 8.2 since this is arguably a performance bug.
need be returned. We keep a heap of the current best N tuples and sift-up
new tuples into it as we scan the input. For M input tuples this means
only about M*log(N) comparisons instead of M*log(M), not to mention a lot
less workspace when N is small --- avoiding spill-to-disk for large M
is actually the most attractive thing about it. Patch includes planner
and executor support for invoking this facility in ORDER BY ... LIMIT
queries. Greg Stark, with some editorialization by moi.
wrong thing when inlining polymorphic SQL functions, because it was using the
function's declared return type where it should have used the actual result
type of the current call. In 8.1 and 8.2 this causes obvious failures even if
you don't have assertions turned on; in 8.0 and 7.4 it would only be a problem
if the inlined expression were used as an input to a function that did
run-time type determination on its inputs. Add a regression test, since this
is evidently an under-tested area.
We can just palloc, instead of using makeNode, when we are going to
overwrite the whole node anyway in the FLATCOPY macro. Also, use
FLATCOPY instead of copyObject for common node types Var and Const.
types of unspecified parameters when submitted via extended query protocol.
This worked in 8.2 but I had broken it during plancache changes. DECLARE
CURSOR is now treated almost exactly like a plain SELECT through parse
analysis, rewrite, and planning; only just before sending to the executor
do we divert it away to ProcessUtility. This requires a special-case check
in a number of places, but practically all of them were already special-casing
SELECT INTO, so it's not too ugly. (Maybe it would be a good idea to merge
the two by treating IntoClause as a form of utility statement? Not going to
worry about that now, though.) That approach doesn't work for EXPLAIN,
however, so for that I punted and used a klugy solution of running parse
analysis an extra time if under extended query protocol.
are mostly excluded by constraints: do the CE test a bit earlier to save
some adjust_appendrel_attrs() work on excluded children, and arrange to
use array indexing rather than rt_fetch() to fetch RTEs in the main body
of the planner. The latter is something I'd wanted to do for awhile anyway,
but seeing list_nth_cell() as 35% of the runtime gets one's attention.
child attnums are the same, before it grovels through each and every child
column looking for a name match. Saves some time in large inheritance trees,
per example from Greg.
competing alternatives for indexes to use in a bitmap scan. The former
coding took estimated selectivity as an overriding factor, causing it to
sometimes choose indexes that were much slower to scan than ones with a
slightly worse selectivity. It was also too narrow-minded about which
combinations of indexes to consider ANDing. The rewrite makes it pay more
attention to index scan cost than selectivity; this seems sane since it's
impossible to have very bad selectivity with low cost, whereas the reverse
isn't true. Also, we now consider each index alone, as well as adding
each index to an AND-group led by each prior index, for a total of about
O(N^2) rather than O(N) combinations considered. This makes the results
much less dependent on the exact order in which the indexes are
considered. It's still a lot cheaper than an O(2^N) exhaustive search.
A prefilter step eliminates all but the cheapest of those indexes using
the same set of WHERE conditions, to keep the effective value of N down in
scenarios where the DBA has created lots of partially-redundant indexes.
access to the planner's cursor-related planning options, and provide new
FETCH/MOVE routines that allow access to the full power of those commands.
Small refactoring of planner(), pg_plan_query(), and pg_plan_queries()
APIs to make it convenient to pass the planning options down from SPI.
This is the core-code portion of Pavel Stehule's patch for scrollable
cursor support in plpgsql; I'll review and apply the plpgsql changes
separately.
possibly be any useful pathkeys --- to wit, queries with neither any
join clauses nor any ORDER BY request. It's nearly free to check for
this case and it saves a useful fraction of the planning time for simple
queries.
seen by code inspecting the expression. The best way to do this seems
to be to drop the original representation as a function invocation, and
instead make a special expression node type that represents applying
the element-type coercion function to each array element. In this way
the element function is exposed and will be checked for volatility.
Per report from Guillaume Smet.
First, genericcostestimate() was being way too liberal about including
partial-index conditions in its selectivity estimate, resulting in
substantial underestimates for situations such as an indexqual "x = 42"
used with an index on x "WHERE x >= 40 AND x < 50". While the code is
intentionally set up to favor selecting partial indexes when available,
this was too much...
Second, choose_bitmap_and() was likewise easily fooled by cases of this
type, since it would similarly think that the partial index had selectivity
independent of the indexqual.
Fixed by using predicate_implied_by() rather than simple equality checks
to determine redundancy. This is a good deal more expensive but I don't
see much alternative. At least the extra cost is only paid when there's
actually a partial index under consideration.
Per report from Jeff Davis. I'm not going to risk back-patching this,
though.
available information about the typmod of an expression; namely, Const,
ArrayRef, ArrayExpr, and EXPR and ARRAY SubLinks. In the ArrayExpr and
SubLink cases it wasn't really the data structure's fault, but exprTypmod()
being lazy. This seems like a good idea in view of the expected increase in
typmod usage from Teodor's work to allow user-defined types to have typmods.
In particular this responds to the concerns we had about eliminating the
special-purpose hack that exprTypmod() used to have for BPCHAR Consts.
We can now tell whether or not such a Const has been cast to a specific
length, and report or display properly if so.
initdb forced due to changes in stored rules.
module and teach PREPARE and protocol-level prepared statements to use it.
In service of this, rearrange utility-statement processing so that parse
analysis does not assume table schemas can't change before execution for
utility statements (necessary because we don't attempt to re-acquire locks
for utility statements when reusing a stored plan). This requires some
refactoring of the ProcessUtility API, but it ends up cleaner anyway,
for instance we can get rid of the QueryContext global.
Still to do: fix up SPI and related code to use the plan cache; I'm tempted to
try to make SQL functions use it too. Also, there are at least some aspects
of system state that we want to ensure remain the same during a replan as in
the original processing; search_path certainly ought to behave that way for
instance, and perhaps there are others.
check_sql_fn_retval allows binary-compatibility cases, the expression
extracted from an inline-able SQL function might have a type that is only
binary-compatible with the declared function result type. To avoid possibly
changing the semantics of the expression, we should insert a RelabelType node
in such cases. This has only been shown to have bad consequences in recent
8.1 and up releases, but I suspect there may be failure cases in the older
branches too, so patch it all the way back. Per bug #3116 from Greg Mullane.
Along the way, fix an omission in eval_const_expressions_mutator: it failed
to copy the relabelformat field when processing a RelabelType. No known
observable failures from this, but it definitely isn't intended behavior.
parent query's EState. Now that there's a single flat rangetable for both
the main plan and subplans, there's no need anymore for a separate EState,
and removing it allows cleaning up some crufty code in nodeSubplan.c and
nodeSubqueryscan.c. Should be a tad faster too, although any difference
will probably be hard to measure. This is the last bit of subsidiary
mop-up work from changing to a flat rangetable.
is still needed despite cleanups in setrefs.c, because the point is to
let the inserted Result node compute a different tlist than its input
node does. Per example from Jeremy Drake.
drill down into subplan targetlists to print the referent expression for an
OUTER or INNER var in an upper plan node. Hence, make it do that always, and
banish the old hack of showing "?columnN?" when things got too complicated.
Along the way, fix an EXPLAIN bug I introduced by suppressing subqueries from
execution-time range tables: get_name_for_var_field() assumed it could look at
rte->subquery to find out the real type of a RECORD var. That doesn't work
anymore, but instead we can look at the input plan of the SubqueryScan plan
node.
and quals have varno OUTER, rather than zero, to indicate a reference to
an output of their lefttree subplan. This is consistent with the way
that every other upper-level node type does it, and allows some simplifications
in setrefs.c and EXPLAIN.
useless substructure for its RangeTblEntry nodes. (I chose to keep using the
same struct node type and just zero out the link fields for unneeded info,
rather than making a separate ExecRangeTblEntry type --- it seemed too
fragile to have two different rangetable representations.)
Along the way, put subplans into a list in the toplevel PlannedStmt node,
and have SubPlan nodes refer to them by list index instead of direct pointers.
Vadim wanted to do that years ago, but I never understood what he was on about
until now. It makes things a *whole* lot more robust, because we can stop
worrying about duplicate processing of subplans during expression tree
traversals. That's been a constant source of bugs, and it's finally gone.
There are some consequent simplifications yet to be made, like not using
a separate EState for subplans in the executor, but I'll tackle that later.
storing mostly-redundant Query trees in prepared statements, portals, etc.
To replace Query, a new node type called PlannedStmt is inserted by the
planner at the top of a completed plan tree; this carries just the fields of
Query that are still needed at runtime. The statement lists kept in portals
etc. now consist of intermixed PlannedStmt and bare utility-statement nodes
--- no Query. This incidentally allows us to remove some fields from Query
and Plan nodes that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Still to do: simplify the execution-time range table; at the moment the
range table passed to the executor still contains Query trees for subqueries.
initdb forced due to change of stored rules.
this code was last gone over, there wasn't really any alternative to
globals because we didn't have the PlannerInfo struct being passed all
through the planner code. Now that we do, we can restructure things
to avoid non-reentrancy. I'm fooling with this because otherwise I'd
have had to add another global variable for the planned compact
range table list.
plan nodes, so that the executor does not need to get these items from
the range table at runtime. This will avoid needing to include these
fields in the compact range table I'm expecting to make the executor use.
forces a particular relation nonnullable, then we can say that the OR does.
This is worth a little extra trouble since it may allow reduction of
outer joins to plain joins.
JOIN quals, just like WHERE quals, even if they reference every one of the
join's relations. Now that we can reorder outer and inner joins, it's
possible for such a qual to end up being assigned to an outer join plan node,
and we mustn't have it treated as a join qual rather than a filter qual for
the node. (If it were, the join could produce null-extended rows that it
shouldn't.) Per bug report from Pelle Johansson.