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587 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Bruce Momjian
6560407c7d Pgindent run before 9.1 beta2. 2011-06-09 14:32:50 -04:00
Tom Lane
e6a30a8c3c Improve cost estimation for aggregates and window functions.
The previous coding failed to account properly for the costs of evaluating
the input expressions of aggregates and window functions, as seen in a
recent gripe from Claudio Freire.  (I said at the time that it wasn't
counting these costs at all; but on closer inspection, it was effectively
charging these costs once per output tuple.  That is completely wrong for
aggregates, and not exactly right for window functions either.)

There was also a hard-wired assumption that aggregates and window functions
had procost 1.0, which is now fixed to respect the actual cataloged costs.

The costing of WindowAgg is still pretty bogus, since it doesn't try to
estimate the effects of spilling data to disk, but that seems like a
separate issue.
2011-04-24 16:55:20 -04:00
Tom Lane
5b8e442953 Make plan_cluster_use_sort cope with no IndexOptInfo for the target index.
The original coding assumed that such a case represents caller error, but
actually get_relation_info will omit generating an IndexOptInfo for any
index it thinks is unsafe to use.  Therefore, handle this case by returning
"true" to indicate that a seqscan-and-sort is the preferred way to
implement the CLUSTER operation.  New bug in 9.1, no backpatch needed.
Per bug #5985 from Daniel Grace.
2011-04-20 17:44:17 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
bf50caf105 pgindent run before PG 9.1 beta 1. 2011-04-10 11:42:00 -04:00
Tom Lane
8df08c8489 Reimplement planner's handling of MIN/MAX aggregate optimization (again).
Instead of playing cute games with pathkeys, just build a direct
representation of the intended sub-select, and feed it through
query_planner to get a Path for the index access.  This is a bit slower
than 9.1's previous method, since we'll duplicate most of the overhead of
query_planner; but since the whole optimization only applies to rather
simple single-table queries, that probably won't be much of a problem in
practice.  The advantage is that we get to do the right thing when there's
a partial index that needs the implicit IS NOT NULL clause to be usable.
Also, although this makes planagg.c be a bit more closely tied to the
ordering of operations in grouping_planner, we can get rid of some coupling
to lower-level parts of the planner.  Per complaint from Marti Raudsepp.
2011-03-22 00:34:31 -04:00
Tom Lane
389af95155 Support data-modifying commands (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) in WITH.
This patch implements data-modifying WITH queries according to the
semantics that the updates all happen with the same command counter value,
and in an unspecified order.  Therefore one WITH clause can't see the
effects of another, nor can the outer query see the effects other than
through the RETURNING values.  And attempts to do conflicting updates will
have unpredictable results.  We'll need to document all that.

This commit just fixes the code; documentation updates are waiting on
author.

Marko Tiikkaja and Hitoshi Harada
2011-02-25 18:58:02 -05:00
Tom Lane
bdca82f44d Add a relkind field to RangeTblEntry to avoid some syscache lookups.
The recent additions for FDW support required checking foreign-table-ness
in several places in the parse/plan chain.  While it's not clear whether
that would really result in a noticeable slowdown, it seems best to avoid
any performance risk by keeping a copy of the relation's relkind in
RangeTblEntry.  That might have some other uses later, anyway.
Per discussion.
2011-02-22 19:24:40 -05:00
Tom Lane
bb74240794 Implement an API to let foreign-data wrappers actually be functional.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed.  A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.

Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
2011-02-20 00:18:14 -05:00
Tom Lane
e617f0d7e4 Fix improper matching of resjunk column names for FOR UPDATE in subselect.
Flattening of subquery range tables during setrefs.c could lead to the
rangetable indexes in PlanRowMark nodes not matching up with the column
names previously assigned to the corresponding resjunk ctid (resp. tableoid
or wholerow) columns.  Typical symptom would be either a "cannot extract
system attribute from virtual tuple" error or an Assert failure.  This
wasn't a problem before 9.0 because we didn't support FOR UPDATE below the
top query level, and so the final flattening could never renumber an RTE
that was relevant to FOR UPDATE.  Fix by using a plan-tree-wide unique
number for each PlanRowMark to label the associated resjunk columns, so
that the number need not change during flattening.

Per report from David Johnston (though I'm darned if I can see how this got
past initial testing of the relevant code).  Back-patch to 9.0.
2011-02-09 23:27:42 -05:00
Tom Lane
f0f36045b2 Revert incorrect memory-conservation hack in inheritance_planner().
This reverts commit d1001a78ce612a16ea622b558f5fc2b68c45ab4c of 2010-12-05,
which was broken as reported by Jeff Davis.  The problem is that the
individual planning steps may have side-effects on substructures of
PlannerGlobal, not only the current PlannerInfo root.  Arranging to keep
all such side effects in the main planning context is probably possible,
but it would change this from a quick local hack into a wide-ranging and
rather fragile endeavor.  Which it's not worth.
2011-01-13 14:33:19 -05:00
Tom Lane
d487afbb81 Fix PlanRowMark/ExecRowMark structures to handle inheritance correctly.
In an inherited UPDATE/DELETE, each target table has its own subplan,
because it might have a column set different from other targets.  This
means that the resjunk columns we add to support EvalPlanQual might be
at different physical column numbers in each subplan.  The EvalPlanQual
rewrite I did for 9.0 failed to account for this, resulting in possible
misbehavior or even crashes during concurrent updates to the same row,
as seen in a recent report from Gordon Shannon.  Revise the data structure
so that we track resjunk column numbers separately for each subplan.

I also chose to move responsibility for identifying the physical column
numbers back to executor startup, instead of assuming that numbers derived
during preprocess_targetlist would stay valid throughout subsequent
massaging of the plan.  That's a bit slower, so we might want to consider
undoing it someday; but it would complicate the patch considerably and
didn't seem justifiable in a bug fix that has to be back-patched to 9.0.
2011-01-12 20:47:02 -05:00
Bruce Momjian
5d950e3b0c Stamp copyrights for year 2011. 2011-01-01 13:18:15 -05:00
Tom Lane
d1001a78ce Reduce memory consumption inside inheritance_planner().
Avoid eating quite so much memory for large inheritance trees, by
reclaiming the space used by temporary copies of the original parsetree and
range table, as well as the workspace needed during planning.  The cost is
needing to copy the finished plan trees out of the child memory context.
Although this looks like it ought to slow things down, my testing shows
it actually is faster, apparently because fewer interactions with malloc()
are needed and/or we can do the work within a more readily cacheable amount
of memory.  That result might be platform-dependent, but I'll take it.

Per a gripe from John Papandriopoulos, in which it was pointed out that the
memory consumption actually grew as O(N^2) for sufficiently many child
tables, since we were creating N copies of the N-element range table.
2010-12-05 15:10:28 -05:00
Tom Lane
d583f10b7e Create core infrastructure for KNNGIST.
This is a heavily revised version of builtin_knngist_core-0.9.  The
ordering operators are no longer mixed in with actual quals, which would
have confused not only humans but significant parts of the planner.
Instead, ordering operators are carried separately throughout planning and
execution.

Since the API for ambeginscan and amrescan functions had to be changed
anyway, this commit takes the opportunity to rationalize that a bit.
RelationGetIndexScan no longer forces a premature index_rescan call;
instead, callers of index_beginscan must call index_rescan too.  Aside from
making the AM-side initialization logic a bit less peculiar, this has the
advantage that we do not make a useless extra am_rescan call when there are
runtime key values.  AMs formerly could not assume that the key values
passed to amrescan were actually valid; now they can.

Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
2010-12-02 20:51:37 -05:00
Tom Lane
0f61d4dd1b Improve relation width estimation for subqueries.
As per the ancient comment for set_rel_width, it really wasn't much good
for relations that aren't plain tables: it would never find any stats and
would always fall back on datatype-based estimates, which are often pretty
silly.  Fix that by copying up width estimates from the subquery planning
process.

At some point we might want to do this for CTEs too, but that would be a
significantly more invasive patch because the sub-PlannerInfo is no longer
accessible by the time it's needed.  I refrained from doing anything about
that, partly for fear of breaking the unmerged CTE-related patches.

In passing, also generate less bogus width estimates for whole-row Vars.

Per a gripe from Jon Nelson.
2010-11-19 17:31:50 -05:00
Tom Lane
6fbc323c80 Further fallout from the MergeAppend patch.
Fix things so that top-N sorting can be used in child Sort nodes of a
MergeAppend node, when there is a LIMIT and no intervening joins or
grouping.  Actually doing this on the executor side isn't too bad,
but it's a bit messier to get the planner to cost it properly.
Per gripe from Robert Haas.

In passing, fix an oversight in the original top-N-sorting patch:
query_planner should not assume that a LIMIT can be used to make an
explicit sort cheaper when there will be grouping or aggregation in
between.  Possibly this should be back-patched, but I'm not sure the
mistake is serious enough to be a real problem in practice.
2010-11-18 00:30:10 -05:00
Tom Lane
947d0c862c Use appendrel planning logic for top-level UNION ALL structures.
Formerly, we could convert a UNION ALL structure inside a subquery-in-FROM
into an appendrel, as a side effect of pulling up the subquery into its
parent; but top-level UNION ALL always caused use of plan_set_operations().
That didn't matter too much because you got an Append-based plan either
way.  However, now that the appendrel code can do things with MergeAppend,
it's worthwhile to hack up the top-level case so it also uses appendrels.

This is a bit of a stopgap; but going much further than this will require
a major rewrite of the planner's set-operations support, which I'm not
prepared to undertake now.  For the moment let's grab the low-hanging fruit.
2010-11-08 15:15:02 -05:00
Tom Lane
034967bdcb Reimplement planner's handling of MIN/MAX aggregate optimization.
Per my recent proposal, get rid of all the direct inspection of indexes
and manual generation of paths in planagg.c.  Instead, set up
EquivalenceClasses for the aggregate argument expressions, and let the
regular path generation logic deal with creating paths that can satisfy
those sort orders.  This makes planagg.c a bit more visible to the rest
of the planner than it was originally, but the approach is basically a lot
cleaner than before.  A major advantage of doing it this way is that we get
MIN/MAX optimization on inheritance trees (using MergeAppend of indexscans)
practically for free, whereas in the old way we'd have had to add a whole
lot more duplicative logic.

One small disadvantage of this approach is that MIN/MAX aggregates can no
longer exploit partial indexes having an "x IS NOT NULL" predicate, unless
that restriction or something that implies it is specified in the query.
The previous implementation was able to use the added "x IS NOT NULL"
condition as an extra predicate proof condition, but in this version we
rely entirely on indexes that are considered usable by the main planning
process.  That seems a fair tradeoff for the simplicity and functionality
gained.
2010-11-04 12:01:17 -04:00
Tom Lane
3ba11d3df2 Teach CLUSTER to use seqscan-and-sort when it's faster than indexscan.
... or at least, when the planner's cost estimates say it will be faster.

Leonardo Francalanci, reviewed by Itagaki Takahiro and Tom Lane
2010-10-07 20:00:28 -04:00
Magnus Hagander
9f2e211386 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
Tom Lane
d174a4adbb Fix "constraint_exclusion = partition" logic so that it will also attempt
constraint exclusion on an inheritance set that is the target of an UPDATE
or DELETE query.  Per gripe from Marc Cousin.  Back-patch to 8.4 where
the feature was introduced.
2010-03-30 21:58:11 +00:00
Bruce Momjian
65e806cba1 pgindent run for 9.0 2010-02-26 02:01:40 +00:00
Tom Lane
ec4be2ee68 Extend the set of frame options supported for window functions.
This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points.  (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)

Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
2010-02-12 17:33:21 +00:00
Tom Lane
76b6ee3f38 Improve planner's choices about when to use hashing vs sorting for DISTINCT.
The previous coding missed a bet by sometimes picking the "sorted" path
from query_planner even though hashing would be preferable.  To fix, we have
to be willing to make the choice sooner.  This contorts things a little bit,
but I thought of a factorization that makes it not too awful.
2010-02-10 03:38:35 +00:00
Bruce Momjian
0239800893 Update copyright for the year 2010. 2010-01-02 16:58:17 +00:00
Tom Lane
34d26872ed Support ORDER BY within aggregate function calls, at long last providing a
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function.  At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.

Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally.  Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.

Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
2009-12-15 17:57:48 +00:00
Tom Lane
46e3a16b05 When FOR UPDATE/SHARE is used with LIMIT, put the LockRows plan node
underneath the Limit node, not atop it.  This fixes the old problem that such
a query might unexpectedly return fewer rows than the LIMIT says, due to
LockRows discarding updated rows.

There is a related problem that LockRows might destroy the sort ordering
produced by earlier steps; but fixing that by pushing LockRows below Sort
would create serious performance problems that are unjustified in many
real-world applications, as well as potential deadlock problems from locking
many more rows than expected.  Instead, keep the present semantics of applying
FOR UPDATE after ORDER BY within a single query level; but allow the user to
specify the other way by writing FOR UPDATE in a sub-select.  To make that
work, track whether FOR UPDATE appeared explicitly in sub-selects or got
pushed down from the parent, and don't flatten a sub-select that contained an
explicit FOR UPDATE.
2009-10-28 14:55:47 +00:00
Tom Lane
9f2ee8f287 Re-implement EvalPlanQual processing to improve its performance and eliminate
a lot of strange behaviors that occurred in join cases.  We now identify the
"current" row for every joined relation in UPDATE, DELETE, and SELECT FOR
UPDATE/SHARE queries.  If an EvalPlanQual recheck is necessary, we jam the
appropriate row into each scan node in the rechecking plan, forcing it to emit
only that one row.  The former behavior could rescan the whole of each joined
relation for each recheck, which was terrible for performance, and what's much
worse could result in duplicated output tuples.

Also, the original implementation of EvalPlanQual could not re-use the recheck
execution tree --- it had to go through a full executor init and shutdown for
every row to be tested.  To avoid this overhead, I've associated a special
runtime Param with each LockRows or ModifyTable plan node, and arranged to
make every scan node below such a node depend on that Param.  Thus, by
signaling a change in that Param, the EPQ machinery can just rescan the
already-built test plan.

This patch also adds a prohibition on set-returning functions in the
targetlist of SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE.  This is needed to avoid the
duplicate-output-tuple problem.  It seems fairly reasonable since the
other restrictions on SELECT FOR UPDATE are meant to ensure that there
is a unique correspondence between source tuples and result tuples,
which an output SRF destroys as much as anything else does.
2009-10-26 02:26:45 +00:00
Tom Lane
0adaf4cb31 Move the handling of SELECT FOR UPDATE locking and rechecking out of
execMain.c and into a new plan node type LockRows.  Like the recent change
to put table updating into a ModifyTable plan node, this increases planning
flexibility by allowing the operations to occur below the top level of the
plan tree.  It's necessary in any case to restore the previous behavior of
having FOR UPDATE locking occur before ModifyTable does.

This partially refactors EvalPlanQual to allow multiple rows-under-test
to be inserted into the EPQ machinery before starting an EPQ test query.
That isn't sufficient to fix EPQ's general bogosity in the face of plans
that return multiple rows per test row, though.  Since this patch is
mostly about getting some plan node infrastructure in place and not about
fixing ten-year-old bugs, I will leave EPQ improvements for another day.

Another behavioral change that we could now think about is doing FOR UPDATE
before LIMIT, but that too seems like it should be treated as a followon
patch.
2009-10-12 18:10:51 +00:00
Tom Lane
8a5849b7ff Split the processing of INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations out of execMain.c.
They are now handled by a new plan node type called ModifyTable, which is
placed at the top of the plan tree.  In itself this change doesn't do much,
except perhaps make the handling of RETURNING lists and inherited UPDATEs a
tad less klugy.  But it is necessary preparation for the intended extension of
allowing RETURNING queries inside WITH.

Marko Tiikkaja
2009-10-10 01:43:50 +00:00
Tom Lane
717fa274d1 Support use of function argument names to identify which actual arguments
match which function parameters.  The syntax uses AS, for example
	funcname(value AS arg1, anothervalue AS arg2)

Pavel Stehule
2009-10-08 02:39:25 +00:00
Bruce Momjian
d747140279 8.4 pgindent run, with new combined Linux/FreeBSD/MinGW typedef list
provided by Andrew.
2009-06-11 14:49:15 +00:00
Tom Lane
c59d8dd44d Improve pull_up_subqueries logic so that it doesn't insert unnecessary
PlaceHolderVar nodes in join quals appearing in or below the lowest
outer join that could null the subquery being pulled up.  This improves
the planner's ability to recognize constant join quals, and probably
helps with detection of common sort keys (equivalence classes) as well.
2009-04-28 21:31:16 +00:00
Tom Lane
1d97c19a0f Fix estimate_num_groups() to not fail on PlaceHolderVars, per report from
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.
2009-04-19 19:46:33 +00:00
Tom Lane
943337ee5e Fix window function plan generation to cope with volatile sort expressions.
(Not clear how useful these really are, but failing is no good...)
Per report from David Fetter and Robert Treat.
2009-03-30 17:30:44 +00:00
Tom Lane
fc022d72c7 Fix stupid parenthesization mistake. Per bug #4728 from Bruce Toll. 2009-03-24 21:12:56 +00:00
Tom Lane
d04db37072 Arrange for function default arguments to be processed properly in expressions
that are set up for execution with ExecPrepareExpr rather than going through
the full planner process.  By introducing an explicit notion of "expression
planning", this patch also lays a bit of groundwork for maybe someday
allowing sub-selects in standalone expressions.
2009-01-09 15:46:11 +00:00
Bruce Momjian
511db38ace Update copyright for 2009. 2009-01-01 17:24:05 +00:00
Tom Lane
8e8854daa2 Add some basic support for window frame clauses to the window-functions
patch.  This includes the ability to force the frame to cover the whole
partition, and the ability to make the frame end exactly on the current row
rather than its last ORDER BY peer.  Supporting any more of the full SQL
frame-clause syntax will require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate
code, so it'll have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.
2008-12-31 00:08:39 +00:00
Tom Lane
95b07bc7f5 Support window functions a la SQL:2008.
Hitoshi Harada, with some kibitzing from Heikki and Tom.
2008-12-28 18:54:01 +00:00
Tom Lane
517ae4039e Code review for function default parameters patch. Fix numerous problems as
per recent discussions.  In passing this also fixes a couple of bugs in
the previous variadic-parameters patch.
2008-12-18 18:20:35 +00:00
Tom Lane
31468d05d8 Dept of better ideas: refrain from creating the planner's placeholder_list
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.
2008-10-22 20:17:52 +00:00
Tom Lane
e6ae3b5dbf Add a concept of "placeholder" variables to the planner. These are variables
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.
2008-10-21 20:42:53 +00:00
Tom Lane
44d5be0e53 Implement SQL-standard WITH clauses, including WITH RECURSIVE.
There are some unimplemented aspects: recursive queries must use UNION ALL
(should allow UNION too), and we don't have SEARCH or CYCLE clauses.
These might or might not get done for 8.4, but even without them it's a
pretty useful feature.

There are also a couple of small loose ends and definitional quibbles,
which I'll send a memo about to pgsql-hackers shortly.  But let's land
the patch now so we can get on with other development.

Yoshiyuki Asaba, with lots of help from Tatsuo Ishii and Tom Lane
2008-10-04 21:56:55 +00:00
Tom Lane
ee33b95d9c Improve the plan cache invalidation mechanism to make it invalidate plans
when user-defined functions used in a plan are modified.  Also invalidate
plans when schemas, operators, or operator classes are modified; but for these
cases we just invalidate everything rather than tracking exact dependencies,
since these types of objects seldom change in a production database.

Tom Lane; loosely based on a patch by Martin Pihlak.
2008-09-09 18:58:09 +00:00
Tom Lane
19e34b6239 Improve sublink pullup code to handle ANY/EXISTS sublinks that are at top
level of a JOIN/ON clause, not only at top level of WHERE.  (However, we
can't do this in an outer join's ON clause, unless the ANY/EXISTS refers
only to the nullable side of the outer join, so that it can effectively
be pushed down into the nullable side.)  Per request from Kevin Grittner.

In passing, fix a bug in the initial implementation of EXISTS pullup:
it would Assert if the EXIST's WHERE clause used a join alias variable.
Since we haven't yet flattened join aliases when this transformation
happens, it's necessary to include join relids in the computed set of
RHS relids.
2008-08-17 01:20:00 +00:00
Tom Lane
e006a24ad1 Implement SEMI and ANTI joins in the planner and executor. (Semijoins replace
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.
2008-08-14 18:48:00 +00:00
Tom Lane
2d1d96b1ce Teach the system how to use hashing for UNION. (INTERSECT/EXCEPT will follow,
but seem like a separate patch since most of the remaining work is on the
executor side.)  I took the opportunity to push selection of the grouping
operators for set operations into the parser where it belongs.  Otherwise this
is just a small exercise in making prepunion.c consider both alternatives.

As with the recent DISTINCT patch, this means we can UNION on datatypes that
can hash but not sort, and it means that UNION without ORDER BY is no longer
certain to produce sorted output.
2008-08-07 01:11:52 +00:00
Tom Lane
c78248c91d Department of second thoughts: fix newly-added code in planner.c to make real
sure that DISTINCT ON does what it's supposed to, ie, sort by the full ORDER
BY list before unique-ifying.  The error seems masked in simple cases by the
fact that query_planner won't return query pathkeys that only partially match
the requested sort order, but I wouldn't want to bet that it couldn't be
exposed in some way or other.
2008-08-05 16:03:10 +00:00
Tom Lane
be3b265c94 Improve SELECT DISTINCT to consider hash aggregation, as well as sort/uniq,
as methods for implementing the DISTINCT step.  This eliminates the former
performance gap between DISTINCT and GROUP BY, and also makes it possible
to do SELECT DISTINCT on datatypes that only support hashing not sorting.

SELECT DISTINCT ON is still always implemented by sorting; it would take
executor changes to support hashing that, and it's not clear it's worth
the trouble.

This is a release-note-worthy incompatibility from previous PG versions,
since SELECT DISTINCT can no longer be counted on to deliver sorted output
without explicitly saying ORDER BY.  (Anyone who can't cope with that
can consider turning off enable_hashagg.)

Several regression test queries needed to have ORDER BY added to preserve
stable output order.  I fixed the ones that manifested here, but there
might be some other cases that show up on other platforms.
2008-08-05 02:43:18 +00:00