The point of a PlaceHolderVar is to allow a non-strict expression to be
evaluated below an outer join, after which its value bubbles up like a Var
and can be forced to NULL when the outer join's semantics require that.
However, there was a serious design oversight in that, namely that we
didn't ensure that there was actually a correct place in the plan tree
to evaluate the placeholder :-(. It may be necessary to delay evaluation
of an outer join to ensure that a placeholder that should be evaluated
below the join can be evaluated there. Per recent bug report from Kirill
Simonov.
Back-patch to 8.4 where the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was introduced.
The previous coding would decide that join removal was unsafe upon finding
a PlaceHolderVar that needed to be evaluated at the inner rel and then used
above the join. However, this fails to cover the case of PlaceHolderVars
that refer to both the inner rel and some other rels. Per bug report from
Andrus.
In these cases a qual can get marked with the removable rel in its
required_relids, but this is just to schedule its evaluation correctly, not
because it really depends on the rel. We were assuming that, in effect,
we could throw away *all* quals so marked, which is nonsense. Tighten up
the logic to be a little more paranoid about which quals belong to the
outer join being considered for removal, and arrange for all quals that
don't belong to be updated so they will still get evaluated correctly.
Also fix another problem that happened to be exposed by this test case,
which was that make_join_rel() was failing to notice some cases where
a constant-false qual could be used to prove a join relation empty. If it's
a pushed-down constant false, then the relation is empty even if it's an
outer join, because the qual applies after the outer join expansion.
Per report from Nathan Grange. Back-patch into 9.0.
