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.
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.
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.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
effects in a nestloop inner indexscan, I had only dealt with plain index
scans and the index portion of bitmap scans. But there will be cache
benefits for the heap accesses of bitmap scans too, so fix
cost_bitmap_heap_scan() to account for that.
clauses containing no variables and no volatile functions. Such a clause
can be used as a one-time qual in a gating Result plan node, to suppress
plan execution entirely when it is false. Even when the clause is true,
putting it in a gating node wins by avoiding repeated evaluation of the
clause. In previous PG releases, query_planner() would do this for
pseudoconstant clauses appearing at the top level of the jointree, but
there was no ability to generate a gating Result deeper in the plan tree.
To fix it, get rid of the special case in query_planner(), and instead
process pseudoconstant clauses through the normal RestrictInfo qual
distribution mechanism. When a pseudoconstant clause is found attached to
a path node in create_plan(), pull it out and generate a gating Result at
that point. This requires special-casing pseudoconstants in selectivity
estimation and cost_qual_eval, but on the whole it's pretty clean.
It probably even makes the planner a bit faster than before for the normal
case of no pseudoconstants, since removing pull_constant_clauses saves one
useless traversal of the qual tree. Per gripe from Phil Frost.
choose_bitmap_and(). It was way too fuzzy --- per comment, it was meant to be
1% relative difference, but was actually coded as 0.01 absolute difference,
thus causing selectivities of say 0.001 and 0.000000000001 to be treated as
equal. I believe this thinko explains Maxim Boguk's recent complaint. While
we could change it to a relative test coded like compare_fuzzy_path_costs(),
there's a bigger problem here, which is that any fuzziness at all renders the
comparison function non-transitive, which could confuse qsort() to the point
of delivering completely wrong results. So forget the whole thing and just
do an exact comparison.
that the Mackert-Lohmann formula applies across all the repetitions of the
nestloop, not just each scan independently. We use the M-L formula to
estimate the number of pages fetched from the index as well as from the table;
that isn't what it was designed for, but it seems reasonably applicable
anyway. This makes large numbers of repetitions look much cheaper than
before, which accords with many reports we've received of overestimation
of the cost of a nestloop. Also, change the index access cost model to
charge random_page_cost per index leaf page touched, while explicitly
not counting anything for access to metapage or upper tree pages. This
may all need tweaking after we get some field experience, but in simple
tests it seems to be giving saner results than before. The main thing
is to get the infrastructure in place to let cost_index() and amcostestimate
functions take repeated scans into account at all. Per my recent proposal.
Note: this patch changes pg_proc.h, but I did not force initdb because
the changes are basically cosmetic --- the system does not look into
pg_proc to decide how to call an index amcostestimate function, and
there's no way to call such a function from SQL at all.
deciding whether a potential additional indexscan is redundant or not. As now
coded, any use of a partial index that was already used in a previous AND arm
will be rejected as redundant. This might be overly restrictive, but not
considering the point at all is definitely bad, as per example in bug #2441
from Arjen van der Meijden. In particular, a clauseless scan of a partial
index was *never* considered redundant by the previous coding, and that's
surely wrong. Being more flexible would also require some consideration
of how not to double-count the index predicate's selectivity.
condition: when there are multiple possible index paths involving
ScalarArrayOpExprs, they are logically to be ANDed together not ORed.
This thinko was a direct consequence of trying to put the processing
inside generate_bitmap_or_paths(), which I now see was a bit too cute.
So pull it out and make the callers do it separately (there are only two
that need it anyway). Partially responds to bug #2441 from Arjen van der Meijden.
There are some additional infelicities exposed by his example, but they
are also in 8.1.x, while this mistake is not.
had a bad side-effect: it stopped finding plans that involved BitmapAnd
combinations of indexscans using both join and non-join conditions. Instead,
make choose_bitmap_and more aggressive about detecting redundancies between
BitmapOr subplans.
at least one join condition as an indexqual. Before bitmap indexscans, this
oversight didn't really cost much except for redundantly considering the
same join paths twice; but as of 8.1 it could result in silly bitmap scans
that would do the same BitmapOr twice and then BitmapAnd these together :-(
relations: fix the executor so that we can have an Append plan on the
inside of a nestloop and still pass down outer index keys to index scans
within the Append, then generate such plans as if they were regular
inner indexscans. This avoids the need to evaluate the outer relation
multiple times.
requested sort order. It was assuming that build_index_pathkeys always
generates a pathkey per index column, which was not true if implied equality
deduction had determined that two index columns were effectively equated to
each other. Simplest fix seems to be to install an option that causes
build_index_pathkeys to support this behavior as well as the original one.
Per report from Brian Hirt.
and rely exclusively on the SQL type system to tell the difference between
the types. Prevent creation of invalid CIDR values via casting from INET
or set_masklen() --- both of these operations now silently zero any bits
to the right of the netmask. Remove duplicate CIDR comparison operators,
letting the type rely on the INET operators instead.
clauses even if it's an outer join. This is a corner case since such
clauses could only arise from weird OUTER JOIN ON conditions, but worth
fixing. Per example from Ron at cheapcomplexdevices.com.
#2075: consider an index redundant if any of its index conditions were already
used, rather than if all of them were. Also, make the selectivity comparison
a bit fuzzy, so that very small differences in estimated selectivities don't
skew the results.
qualification when the underlying operator is indexable and useOr is true.
That is, indexkey op ANY (ARRAY[...]) is effectively translated into an
OR combination of one indexscan for each array element. This only works
for bitmap index scans, of course, since regular indexscans no longer
support OR'ing of scans. There are still some loose ends to clean up
before changing 'x IN (list)' to translate as a ScalarArrayOpExpr;
for instance predtest.c ought to be taught about it. But this gets the
basic functionality in place.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
sense and rename to "outerjoin_delayed" to more clearly reflect what it
means). I had decided that it was redundant in 8.1, but the folly of this
is exposed by a bug report from Sebastian Böck. The place where it's
needed is to prevent orindxpath.c from cherry-picking arms of an outer-join
OR clause to form a relation restriction that isn't actually legal to push
down to the relation scan level. There may be some legal cases that this
forbids optimizing, but we'd need much closer analysis to determine it.
"optimization". When we find a potentially useful joinclause, we
have to add all its other required_relids to the result, not only the
other clause_relids. They are different in the case of a joinclause
whose applicability has to be postponed due to outer join. We have
to include the extra rels because otherwise, after best_inner_indexscan
masks the join rels with index_outer_relids, it will always fail to
find the joinclause as applicable. Per report from Husam Tomeh.
planning logic for bitmap indexscans. Partial indexes create corner
cases in which a scan might be done with no explicit index qual conditions,
and the code wasn't handling those cases nicely. Also be a little
tenser about eliminating redundant clauses in the generated plan.
Per report from Dmitry Karasik.
propagated inside an outer join. In particular, given
LEFT JOIN ON (A = B) WHERE A = constant, we cannot conclude that
B = constant at the top level (B might be null instead), but we
can nonetheless put a restriction B = constant into the quals for
B's relation, since no inner-side rows not meeting that condition
can contribute to the final result. Similarly, given
FULL JOIN USING (J) WHERE J = constant, we can't directly conclude
that either input J variable = constant, but it's OK to push such
quals into each input rel. Per recent gripe from Kim Bisgaard.
Along the way, remove 'valid_everywhere' flag from RestrictInfo,
as on closer analysis it was not being used for anything, and was
defined backwards anyway.
constraint while determining whether the index sort order matches the
query's ORDER BY. This for example allows an index on (x,y) to match
... WHERE x = 42 ORDER BY y;
It only works for btree indexes, but since those are the only ones we
currently have that are ordered at all, that's good enough for now.
Per popular demand.
nonconsecutive columns of a multicolumn index, as per discussion around
mid-May (pghackers thread "Best way to scan on-disk bitmaps"). This
turns out to require only minimal changes in btree, and so far as I can
see none at all in GiST. btcostestimate did need some work, but its
original assumption that index selectivity == heap selectivity was
quite bogus even before this.
of a relation in a flat 'joininfo' list. The former arrangement grouped
the join clauses according to the set of unjoined relids used in each;
however, profiling on test cases involving lots of joins proves that
that data structure is a net loss. It takes more time to group the
join clauses together than is saved by avoiding duplicate tests later.
It doesn't help any that there are usually not more than one or two
clauses per group ...
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.
which is neither needed by nor related to that header. Remove the bogus
inclusion and instead include the header in those C files that actually
need it. Also fix unnecessary inclusions and bad inclusion order in
tsearch2 files.
or bitmap), use pred_test to be a little smarter about cases where a
filter clause is logically unnecessary. This may be overkill for the
plain indexscan case, but it's definitely useful for OR'd bitmap scans.
node, as this behavior is now better done as a bitmap OR indexscan.
This allows considerable simplification in nodeIndexscan.c itself as
well as several planner modules concerned with indexscan plan generation.
Also we can improve the sharing of code between regular and bitmap
indexscans, since they are now working with nigh-identical Plan nodes.
make some estimate of which available indexes to AND together, rather
than blindly taking 'em all. This could probably stand further
improvement, but it seems to do OK in simple tests.
but the code is basically working. Along the way, rewrite the entire
approach to processing OR index conditions, and make it work in join
cases for the first time ever. orindxpath.c is now basically obsolete,
but I left it in for the time being to allow easy comparison testing
against the old implementation.
into indexscans on matching indexes. For the moment, it only handles
int4 and text datatypes; next step is to add a column to pg_aggregate
so that all MIN/MAX aggregates can be handled. Per my recent proposal.
really ought to run before canonicalize_qual, because it can now produce
forms that canonicalize_qual knows how to improve (eg, NOT clauses).
Also, because eval_const_expressions already knows about flattening
nested ANDs and ORs into N-argument form, the initial flatten_andors
pass in canonicalize_qual is now completely redundant and can be
removed. This doesn't save a whole lot of code, but the time and
palloc traffic eliminated is a useful gain on large expression trees.
