Although I think on all modern machines floating division by zero
results in Infinity not SIGFPE, we still don't want infinities
running around in the planner's costing estimates; too much risk
of that leading to insane behavior.
grouping_planner() failed to consider the possibility that final_rel
might be known dummy and hence have zero rowcount. (I wonder if it
would be better to set a rows estimate of 1 for dummy relations?
But at least in the back branches, changing this convention seems
like a bad idea, so I'll leave that for another day.)
Make certain that get_variable_numdistinct() produces a nonzero result.
The case that can be shown to be broken is with stadistinct < 0.0 and
small ntuples; we did not prevent the result from rounding to zero.
For good luck I applied clamp_row_est() to all the nonconstant return
values.
In ExecChooseHashTableSize(), Assert that we compute positive nbuckets
and nbatch. I know of no reason to think this isn't the case, but it
seems like a good safety check.
Per reports from Piotr Stefaniak. Back-patch to all active branches.
This was not changed in HEAD, but will be done later as part of a
pgindent run. Future pgindent runs will also do this.
Report by Tom Lane
Backpatch through all supported branches, but not HEAD
If there are lots of uncommitted tuples at the end of the index range,
get_actual_variable_range() ends up fetching each one and doing an MVCC
visibility check on it, until it finally hits a visible tuple. This is
bad enough in isolation, considering that we don't need an exact answer
only an approximate one. But because the tuples are not yet committed,
each visibility check does a TransactionIdIsInProgress() test, which
involves scanning the ProcArray. When multiple sessions do this
concurrently, the ensuing contention results in horrid performance loss.
20X overall throughput loss on not-too-complicated queries is easy to
demonstrate in the back branches (though someone's made it noticeably
less bad in HEAD).
We can dodge the problem fairly effectively by using SnapshotDirty rather
than a normal MVCC snapshot. This will cause the index probe to take
uncommitted tuples as good, so that we incur only one tuple fetch and test
even if there are many such tuples. The extent to which this degrades the
estimate is debatable: it's possible the result is actually a more accurate
prediction than before, if the endmost tuple has become committed by the
time we actually execute the query being planned. In any case, it's not
very likely that it makes the estimate a lot worse.
SnapshotDirty will still reject tuples that are known committed dead, so
we won't give bogus answers if an invalid outlier has been deleted but not
yet vacuumed from the index. (Because btrees know how to mark such tuples
dead in the index, we shouldn't have a big performance problem in the case
that there are many of them at the end of the range.) This consideration
motivates not using SnapshotAny, which was also considered as a fix.
Note: the back branches were using SnapshotNow instead of an MVCC snapshot,
but the problem and solution are the same.
Per performance complaints from Bartlomiej Romanski, Josh Berkus, and
others. Back-patch to 9.0, where the issue was introduced (by commit
40608e7f94).
In a boolean column that contains mostly nulls, ANALYZE might not find
enough non-null values to populate the most-common-values stats,
but it would still create a pg_statistic entry with stanullfrac set.
The logic in booltestsel() for this situation did the wrong thing for
"col IS NOT TRUE" and "col IS NOT FALSE" tests, forgetting that null
values would satisfy these tests (so that the true selectivity would
be close to one, not close to zero). Per bug #8274.
Fix by Andrew Gierth, some comment-smithing by me.
This case doesn't normally happen, because the planner usually clamps
all row estimates to at least one row; but I found that it can arise
when dealing with relations excluded by constraints. Without a defense,
estimate_num_groups() can return zero, which leads to divisions by zero
inside the planner as well as assertion failures in the executor.
An alternative fix would be to change set_dummy_rel_pathlist() to make
the size estimate for a dummy relation 1 row instead of 0, but that seemed
pretty ugly; and probably someday we'll want to drop the convention that
the minimum rowcount estimate is 1 row.
Back-patch to 8.4, as the problem can be demonstrated that far back.
Previously, pattern_fixed_prefix() was defined to return whatever fixed
prefix it could extract from the pattern, plus the "rest" of the pattern.
That definition was sensible for LIKE patterns, but not so much for
regexes, where reconstituting a valid pattern minus the prefix could be
quite tricky (certainly the existing code wasn't doing that correctly).
Since the only thing that callers ever did with the "rest" of the pattern
was to pass it to like_selectivity() or regex_selectivity(), let's cut out
the middle-man and just have pattern_fixed_prefix's subroutines do this
directly. Then pattern_fixed_prefix can return a simple selectivity
number, and the question of how to cope with partial patterns is removed
from its API specification.
While at it, adjust the API spec so that callers who don't actually care
about the pattern's selectivity (which is a lot of them) can pass NULL for
the selectivity pointer to skip doing the work of computing a selectivity
estimate.
This patch is only an API refactoring that doesn't actually change any
processing, other than allowing a little bit of useless work to be skipped.
However, it's necessary infrastructure for my upcoming fix to regex prefix
extraction, because after that change there won't be any simple way to
identify the "rest" of the regex, not even to the low level of fidelity
needed by regex_selectivity. We can cope with that if regex_fixed_prefix
and regex_selectivity communicate directly, but not if we have to work
within the old API. Hence, back-patch to all active branches.
estimate_num_groups() gets unhappy with
create table empty();
select * from empty except select * from empty e2;
I can't see any actual use-case for such a query (and the table is illegal
per SQL spec), but it seems like a good idea that it not cause an assert
failure.
The uniqueness condition might fail to hold intra-transaction, and assuming
it does can give incorrect query results. Per report from Marti Raudsepp,
though this is not his proposed patch.
Back-patch to 9.0, where both these features were introduced. In the
released branches, add the new IndexOptInfo field to the end of the struct,
to try to minimize ABI breakage for third-party code that may be examining
that struct.
Examination of examples provided by Mark Kirkwood and others has convinced
me that actually commit 7f3eba30c9 was quite
a few bricks shy of a load. The useful part of that patch was clamping
ndistinct for the inner side of a semi or anti join, and the reason why
that's needed is that it's the only way that restriction clauses
eliminating rows from the inner relation can affect the estimated size of
the join result. I had not clearly understood why the clamping was
appropriate, and so mis-extrapolated to conclude that we should clamp
ndistinct for the outer side too, as well as for both sides of regular
joins. These latter actions were all wrong, and are reverted with this
patch. In addition, the clamping logic is now made to affect the behavior
of both paths in eqjoinsel_semi, with or without MCV lists to compare.
When we have MCVs, we suppose that the most common values are the ones
that are most likely to survive the decimation resulting from a lower
restriction clause, so we think of the clamping as eliminating non-MCV
values, or potentially even the least-common MCVs for the inner relation.
Back-patch to 8.4, same as previous fixes in this area.
This patch fixes an oversight in my commit
7f3eba30c9 of 2008-10-23. That patch
accounted for baserel restriction clauses that reduced the number of rows
coming out of a table (and hence the number of possibly-distinct values of
a join variable), but not for join restriction clauses that might have been
applied at a lower level of join. To account for the latter, look up the
sizes of the min_lefthand and min_righthand inputs of the current join,
and clamp with those in the same way as for the base relations.
Noted while investigating a complaint from Ben Chobot, although this in
itself doesn't seem to explain his report.
Back-patch to 8.4; previous versions used different estimation methods
for which this heuristic isn't relevant.
In particular, if we don't have real ndistinct estimates for both sides,
fall back to assuming that half of the left-hand rows have join partners.
This is what was done in 8.2 and 8.3 (cf nulltestsel() in those versions).
It's pretty stupid but it won't lead us to think that an antijoin produces
no rows out, as seen in recent example from Uwe Schroeder.
That function was supposing that indexoid == 0 for a hypothetical index,
but that is not likely to be true in any non-toy implementation of an index
adviser, since assigning a fake OID is the only way to know at EXPLAIN time
which hypothetical index got selected. Fix by adding a flag to
IndexOptInfo to mark hypothetical indexes. Back-patch to 9.0 where
get_actual_variable_range() was added.
Gurjeet Singh
The "date" type supports a wider range of dates than int64 timestamps do.
However, there is pre-int64-timestamp code in the planner that assumes that
all date values can be converted to timestamp with impunity. Fortunately,
what we really need out of the conversion is always a double (float8)
value; so even when the date is out of timestamp's range it's possible to
produce a sane answer. All we need is a code path that doesn't try to
force the result into int64. Per trouble report from David Rericha.
Back-patch to all supported versions. Although this is surely a corner
case, there's not much point in advertising a date range wider than
timestamp's if we will choke on such values in unexpected places.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
This patch only supports seq_page_cost and random_page_cost as parameters,
but it provides the infrastructure to scalably support many more.
In particular, we may want to add support for effective_io_concurrency,
but I'm leaving that as future work for now.
Thanks to Tom Lane for design help and Alvaro Herrera for the review.
"column < constant", and the comparison value is in the first or last
histogram bin or outside the histogram entirely, try to fetch the actual
column min or max value using an index scan (if there is an index on the
column). If successful, replace the lower or upper histogram bound with
that value before carrying on with the estimate. This limits the
estimation error caused by moving min/max values when the comparison
value is close to the min or max. Per a complaint from Josh Berkus.
It is tempting to consider using this mechanism for mergejoinscansel as well,
but that would inject index fetches into main-line join estimation not just
endpoint cases. I'm refraining from that until we can get a better handle
on the costs of doing this type of lookup.
to be just a minor extension of the previous patch that made "x IS NULL"
indexable, because we can treat the IS NOT NULL condition as if it were
"x < NULL" or "x > NULL" (depending on the index's NULLS FIRST/LAST option),
just like IS NULL is treated like "x = NULL". Aside from any possible
usefulness in its own right, this is an important improvement for
index-optimized MAX/MIN aggregates: it is now reliably possible to get
a column's min or max value cheaply, even when there are a lot of nulls
cluttering the interesting end of the index.
and teach ANALYZE to compute such stats for tables that have subclasses.
Per my proposal of yesterday.
autovacuum still needs to be taught about running ANALYZE on parent tables
when their subclasses change, but the feature is useful even without that.
style by default. Per discussion, there seems to be hardly anything that
really relies on being able to change the regex flavor, so the ability to
select it via embedded options ought to be enough for any stragglers.
Also, if we didn't remove the GUC, we'd really be morally obligated to
mark the regex functions non-immutable, which'd possibly create performance
issues.
Both hex format and the traditional "escape" format are automatically
handled on input. The output format is selected by the new GUC variable
bytea_output.
As committed, bytea_output defaults to HEX, which is an *incompatible
change*. We will keep it this way for awhile for testing purposes, but
should consider whether to switch to the more backwards-compatible
default of ESCAPE before 8.5 is released.
Peter Eisentraut
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.
unique for a particular query, if the index predicate is satisfied. This
requires a bit of reordering of operations so that we check the predicates
before doing any selectivity estimates, but shouldn't really cause any
noticeable slowdown. Per a comment from Michal Politowski.
inputs is unique or nearly so), make eqjoinsel() clamp the ndistinct estimates
to be not more than the estimated number of rows coming from the input
relations. This allows the estimate to change in response to the selectivity
of restriction conditions on the inputs.
This is a pretty narrow patch and maybe we should be more aggressive about
similarly clamping ndistinct in other cases; but I'm worried about
double-counting the effects of the restriction conditions. However, it seems
to help for the case exhibited by Grzegorz Jaskiewicz (antijoin against a
small subset of a relation), so let's try this for awhile.
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.
applied to expression indexes, not to plain relations. The original coding
in btcostestimate conflated the two cases, but it's not hard to use
get_relation_stats_hook instead when we're looking to the underlying relation.
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.
and anti joins. To do this, pass the SpecialJoinInfo struct for the current
join as an additional optional argument to operator join selectivity
estimation functions. This allows the estimator to tell not only what kind
of join is being formed, but which variable is on which side of the join;
a requirement long recognized but not dealt with till now. This also leaves
the door open for future improvements in the estimators, such as accounting
for the null-insertion effects of lower outer joins. I didn't do anything
about that in the current patch but the information is in principle deducible
from what's passed.
The patch also clarifies the definition of join selectivity for semi/anti
joins: it's the fraction of the left input that has (at least one) match
in the right input. This allows getting rid of some very fuzzy thinking
that I had committed in the original 7.4-era IN-optimization patch.
There's probably room to estimate this better than the present patch does,
but at least we know what to estimate.
Since I had to touch CREATE OPERATOR anyway to allow a variant signature
for join estimator functions, I took the opportunity to add a couple of
additional checks that were missing, per my recent message to -hackers:
* Check that estimator functions return float8;
* Require execute permission at the time of CREATE OPERATOR on the
operator's function as well as the estimator functions;
* Require ownership of any pre-existing operator that's modified by
the command.
I also moved the lookup of the functions out of OperatorCreate() and
into operatorcmds.c, since that seemed more consistent with most of
the other catalog object creation processes, eg CREATE TYPE.
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.
results always contribute two groups, regardless of the expression contents.
This is very substantially more accurate than the regular heuristic for
certain boolean tests like "col IS NULL". Per gripe from Sam Mason.
Back-patch to all supported releases, since the behavior of
estimate_num_groups() hasn't changed all that much since 7.4.
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.
no particular need to do get_op_opfamily_properties() while building an
indexscan plan. Postpone that lookup until executor start. This simplifies
createplan.c a lot more than it complicates nodeIndexscan.c, and makes things
more uniform since we already had to do it that way for RowCompare
expressions. Should be a bit faster too, at least for plans that aren't
re-used many times, since we avoid palloc'ing and perhaps copying the
intermediate list data structure.
strings. This patch introduces four support functions cstring_to_text,
cstring_to_text_with_len, text_to_cstring, and text_to_cstring_buffer, and
two macros CStringGetTextDatum and TextDatumGetCString. A number of
existing macros that provided variants on these themes were removed.
Most of the places that need to make such conversions now require just one
function or macro call, in place of the multiple notational layers that used
to be needed. There are no longer any direct calls of textout or textin,
and we got most of the places that were using handmade conversions via
memcpy (there may be a few still lurking, though).
This commit doesn't make any serious effort to eliminate transient memory
leaks caused by detoasting toasted text objects before they reach
text_to_cstring. We changed PG_GETARG_TEXT_P to PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP in a few
places where it was easy, but much more could be done.
Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane
pattern-examination heuristic method to purely histogram-driven selectivity at
histogram size 100, we compute both estimates and use a weighted average.
The weight put on the heuristic estimate decreases linearly with histogram
size, dropping to zero for 100 or more histogram entries.
Likewise in ltreeparentsel(). After a patch by Greg Stark, though I
reorganized the logic a bit to give the caller of histogram_selectivity()
more control.
of the generated range condition var >= 'foo' AND var < 'fop' as being less
than what eqsel() would estimate for var = 'foo'. This is intuitively
reasonable and it gets rid of the need for some entirely ad-hoc coding we
formerly used to reject bogus estimates. The basic problem here is that
if the prefix is more than a few characters long, the two boundary values
are too close together to be distinguishable by comparison to the column
histogram, resulting in a selectivity estimate of zero, which is often
not very sane. Change motivated by an example from Peter Eisentraut.
Arguably this is a bug fix, but I'll refrain from back-patching it
for the moment.
the two join variables at both ends: not only trailing rows that need not be
scanned because there cannot be a match on the other side, but initial rows
that will be scanned without possibly having a match. This allows a more
realistic estimate of startup cost to be made, per recent pgsql-performance
discussion. In passing, fix a couple of bugs that had crept into
mergejoinscansel: it was not quite up to speed for the task of estimating
descending-order scans, which is a new requirement in 8.3.
out that it's actually quite likely that a string that is an extension of
the given prefix will sort as larger than the "greater" string our previous
code created. To provide some defense against that, do the comparisons
against a modified string instead of just the bare prefix. We tack on
"Z", "z", "y", or "9", whichever is seen as largest in the current locale.
Testing suggests that this is sufficient at least for cases involving
ASCII data.
make_greater_string() try harder to generate a string that's actually greater
than its input string. Before we just assumed that making a string that was
memcmp-greater was enough, but it is easy to generate examples where this is
not so when the locale is not C. Instead, loop until the relevant comparison
function agrees that the generated string is greater than the input.
Unfortunately this is probably not enough to guarantee that the generated
string is greater than all extensions of the input, so we cannot relax the
restriction to C locale for the LIKE/regex index optimization. But it should
at least improve the odds of getting a useful selectivity estimate in
prefix_selectivity(). Per example from Guillaume Smet.
Backpatch to 8.1, mainly because that's what the complainant is using...
negated-match operators. patternsel had been using the supplied operator as
though it were a positive-match operator, and thus obtaining a wrong result,
which was even more wrong after the caller subtracted it from 1. Seems
cleanest to give patternsel an explicit "negate" argument so that it knows
what's going on. Also install the same factorization scheme for pattern
join selectivity estimators; even though they are just stubs at the
moment, this may keep someone from making the same type of mistake when
they get filled out. Per report from Greg Mullane.
Backpatch to 8.2 --- previous releases do not show the problem because
patternsel() doesn't actually use the operator directly.
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.
Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, but I did a lot of editorializing,
so anything that's broken is probably my fault.
Documentation is nonexistent as yet, but let's land the patch so we can
get some portability testing done.
