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
The planner largely failed to consider the possibility that a
PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain a lateral reference to a Var
coming from somewhere outside the PHV's syntactic scope. We had a previous
report of a problem in this area, which I tried to fix in a quick-hack way
in commit 4da6439bd8553059766011e2a42c6e39df08717f, but Antonin Houska
pointed out that there were still some problems, and investigation turned
up other issues. This patch largely reverts that commit in favor of a more
thoroughly thought-through solution. The new theory is that a PHV's
ph_eval_at level cannot be higher than its original syntactic level. If it
contains lateral references, those don't change the ph_eval_at level, but
rather they create a lateral-reference requirement for the ph_eval_at join
relation. The code in joinpath.c needs to handle that.
Another issue is that createplan.c wasn't handling nested PlaceHolderVars
properly.
In passing, push knowledge of lateral-reference checks for join clauses
into join_clause_is_movable_to. This is mainly so that FDWs don't need
to deal with it.
This patch doesn't fix the original join-qual-placement problem reported by
Jeremy Evans (and indeed, one of the new regression test cases shows the
wrong answer because of that). But the PlaceHolderVar problems need to be
fixed before that issue can be addressed, so committing this separately
seems reasonable.
This patch gets rid of the concept of, and infrastructure for,
non-canonical PathKeys; we now only ever create canonical pathkey lists.
The need for non-canonical pathkeys came from the desire to have
grouping_planner initialize query_pathkeys and related pathkey lists before
calling query_planner. However, since query_planner didn't actually *do*
anything with those lists before they'd been made canonical, we can get rid
of the whole mess by just not creating the lists at all until the point
where we formerly canonicalized them.
There are several ways in which we could implement that without making
query_planner itself deal with grouping/sorting features (which are
supposed to be the province of grouping_planner). I chose to add a
callback function to query_planner's API; other alternatives would have
required adding more fields to PlannerInfo, which while not bad in itself
would create an ABI break for planner-related plugins in the 9.2 release
series. This still breaks ABI for anything that calls query_planner
directly, but it seems somewhat unlikely that there are any such plugins.
I had originally conceived of this change as merely a step on the way to
fixing bug #8049 from Teun Hoogendoorn; but it turns out that this fixes
that bug all by itself, as per the added regression test. The reason is
that now get_eclass_for_sort_expr is adding the ORDER BY expression at the
end of EquivalenceClass creation not the start, and so anything that is in
a multi-member EquivalenceClass has already been created with correct
em_nullable_relids. I am suspicious that there are related scenarios in
which we still need to teach get_eclass_for_sort_expr to compute correct
nullable_relids, but am not eager to risk destabilizing either 9.2 or 9.3
to fix bugs that are only hypothetical. So for the moment, do this and
stop here.
Back-patch to 9.2 but not to earlier branches, since they don't exhibit
this bug for lack of join-clause-movement logic that depends on
em_nullable_relids being correct. (We might have to revisit that choice
if any related bugs turn up.) In 9.2, don't change the signature of
make_pathkeys_for_sortclauses nor remove canonicalize_pathkeys, so as
not to risk more plugin breakage than we have to.
In the initial cut at LATERAL, I kept the rule that cheapest_total_path
was always unparameterized, which meant it had to be NULL if the relation
has no unparameterized paths. It turns out to work much more nicely if
we always have *some* path nominated as cheapest-total for each relation.
In particular, let's still say it's the cheapest unparameterized path if
there is one; if not, take the cheapest-total-cost path among those of
the minimum available parameterization. (The first rule is actually
a special case of the second.)
This allows reversion of some temporary lobotomizations I'd put in place.
In particular, the planner can now consider hash and merge joins for
joins below a parameter-supplying nestloop, even if there aren't any
unparameterized paths available. This should bring planning of
LATERAL-containing queries to the same level as queries not using that
feature.
Along the way, simplify management of parameterized paths in add_path()
and friends. In the original coding for parameterized paths in 9.2,
I tried to minimize the logic changes in add_path(), so it just treated
parameterization as yet another dimension of comparison for paths.
We later made it ignore pathkeys (sort ordering) of parameterized paths,
on the grounds that ordering isn't a useful property for the path on the
inside of a nestloop, so we might as well get rid of useless parameterized
paths as quickly as possible. But we didn't take that reasoning as far as
we should have. Startup cost isn't a useful property inside a nestloop
either, so add_path() ought to discount startup cost of parameterized paths
as well. Having done that, the secondary sorting I'd implemented (in
add_parameterized_path) is no longer needed --- any parameterized path that
survives add_path() at all is worth considering at higher levels. So this
should be a bit faster as well as simpler.
This patch takes care of a number of problems having to do with failure
to choose valid join orders and incorrect handling of lateral references
pulled up from subqueries. Notable changes:
* Add a LateralJoinInfo data structure similar to SpecialJoinInfo, to
represent join ordering constraints created by lateral references.
(I first considered extending the SpecialJoinInfo structure, but the
semantics are different enough that a separate data structure seems
better.) Extend join_is_legal() and related functions to prevent trying
to form unworkable joins, and to ensure that we will consider joins that
satisfy lateral references even if the joins would be clauseless.
* Fill in the infrastructure needed for the last few types of relation scan
paths to support parameterization. We'd have wanted this eventually
anyway, but it is necessary now because a relation that gets pulled up out
of a UNION ALL subquery may acquire a reltargetlist containing lateral
references, meaning that its paths *have* to be parameterized whether or
not we have any code that can push join quals down into the scan.
* Compute data about lateral references early in query_planner(), and save
in RelOptInfo nodes, to avoid repetitive calculations later.
* Assorted corner-case bug fixes.
There's probably still some bugs left, but this is a lot closer to being
real than it was before.
In commit 57664ed25e5dea117158a2e663c29e60b3546e1c I tried to fix a bug
reported by Teodor Sigaev by making non-simple-Var output columns distinct
(by wrapping their expressions with dummy PlaceHolderVar nodes). This did
not work too well. Commit b28ffd0fcc583c1811e5295279e7d4366c3cae6c fixed
some ensuing problems with matching to child indexes, but per a recent
report from Claus Stadler, constraint exclusion of UNION ALL subqueries was
still broken, because constant-simplification didn't handle the injected
PlaceHolderVars well either. On reflection, the original patch was quite
misguided: there is no reason to expect that EquivalenceClass child members
will be distinct. So instead of trying to make them so, we should ensure
that we can cope with the situation when they're not.
Accordingly, this patch reverts the code changes in the above-mentioned
commits (though the regression test cases they added stay). Instead, I've
added assorted defenses to make sure that duplicate EC child members don't
cause any problems. Teodor's original problem ("MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend") is addressed more directly by
revising prepare_sort_from_pathkeys to let the parent MergeAppend's sort
list guide creation of each child's sort list.
In passing, get rid of add_sort_column; as far as I can tell, testing for
duplicate sort keys at this stage is dead code. Certainly it doesn't
trigger often enough to be worth expending cycles on in ordinary queries.
And keeping the test would've greatly complicated the new logic in
prepare_sort_from_pathkeys, because comparing pathkey list entries against
a previous output array requires that we not skip any entries in the list.
Back-patch to 9.1, like the previous patches. The only known issue in
this area that wasn't caused by the ill-advised previous patches was the
MergeAppend planning failure, which of course is not relevant before 9.1.
It's possible that we need some of the new defenses against duplicate child
EC entries in older branches, but until there's some clear evidence of that
I'm going to refrain from back-patching further.
This patch fixes the planner so that it can generate nestloop-with-
inner-indexscan plans even with one or more levels of joining between
the indexscan and the nestloop join that is supplying the parameter.
The executor was fixed to handle such cases some time ago, but the
planner was not ready. This should improve our plans in many situations
where join ordering restrictions formerly forced complete table scans.
There is probably a fair amount of tuning work yet to be done, because
of various heuristics that have been added to limit the number of
parameterized paths considered. However, we are not going to find out
what needs to be adjusted until the code gets some real-world use, so
it's time to get it in there where it can be tested easily.
Note API change for index AM amcostestimate functions. I'm not aware of
any non-core index AMs, but if there are any, they will need minor
adjustments.
Add PlaceHolderVar wrappers as needed to make UNION ALL sub-select output
expressions appear non-constant and distinct from each other. This makes
the world safe for add_child_rel_equivalences to do what it does. Before,
it was possible for that function to add identical expressions to different
EquivalenceClasses, which logically should imply merging such ECs, which
would be wrong; or to improperly add a constant to an EquivalenceClass,
drastically changing its behavior. Per report from Teodor Sigaev.
The only currently known consequence of this bug is "MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend" planner failures in 9.1 and later.
I am suspicious that there may be other failure modes that could affect
older release branches; but in the absence of any hard evidence, I'll
refrain from back-patching further than 9.1.
Formerly, set_subquery_pathlist and other creators of plans for subqueries
saved only the rangetable and rowMarks lists from the lower-level
PlannerInfo. But there's no reason not to remember the whole PlannerInfo,
and indeed this turns out to simplify matters in a number of places.
The immediate reason for doing this was so that the subroot will still be
accessible when we're trying to extract column statistics out of an
already-planned subquery. But now that I've done it, it seems like a good
code-beautification effort in its own right.
I also chose to get rid of the transient subrtable and subrowmark fields in
SubqueryScan nodes, in favor of having setrefs.c look up the subquery's
RelOptInfo. That required changing all the APIs in setrefs.c to pass
PlannerInfo not PlannerGlobal, which was a large but quite mechanical
transformation.
One side-effect not foreseen at the beginning is that this finally broke
inheritance_planner's assumption that replanning the same subquery RTE N
times would necessarily give interchangeable results each time. That
assumption was always pretty risky, but now we really have to make a
separate RTE for each instance so that there's a place to carry the
separate subroots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
by adding a requirement that build_join_rel add new join RelOptInfos to the
appropriate list immediately at creation. Per report from Robert Haas,
the list_concat_unique_ptr() calls that this change eliminates were taking
the lion's share of the runtime in larger join problems. This doesn't do
anything to fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join
problems, but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.
Note: because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built,
it might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
alternatives have exactly the same costs. There is one example in the
regression tests.
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.
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.
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.
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.
sorting. The infrastructure for this was all in place already; it's only
necessary to fix the planner to not assume that sorting is always an available
option.
to represent DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON. This gets rid of a longstanding
annoyance that a view or rule using SELECT DISTINCT will be dumped out
with an overspecified ORDER BY list, and is one small step along the way
to decoupling DISTINCT and ORDER BY enough so that hash-based implementation
of DISTINCT will be possible. In passing, improve transformDistinctClause
so that it doesn't reject duplicate DISTINCT ON items, as was reported by
Steve Midgley a couple weeks ago.
clauseless joins of relations that have unexploited join clauses. Rather
than looking at every other base relation in the query, the correct thing is
to examine the other relations in the "initial_rels" list of the current
make_rel_from_joinlist() invocation, because those are what we actually have
the ability to join against. This might be a subset of the whole query in
cases where join_collapse_limit or from_collapse_limit or full joins have
prevented merging the whole query into a single join problem. This is a bit
untidy because we have to pass those rels down through a new PlannerInfo
field, but it's necessary. Per bug #3865 from Oleg Kharin.
eval_const_expressions simplifies this to just "WHERE false", but we have
already done pull_up_IN_clauses so the IN join will be done, or at least
planned, anyway. The trouble case comes when the sub-SELECT is itself a join
and we decide to implement the IN by unique-ifying the sub-SELECT outputs:
with no remaining reference to the output Vars in WHERE, we won't have
propagated the Vars up to the upper join point, leading to "variable not found
in subplan target lists" error. Fix by adding an extra scan of in_info_list
and forcing all Vars mentioned therein to be propagated up to the IN join
point. Per bug report from Miroslav Sulc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
tables in the query compete for cache space, not just the one we are
currently costing an indexscan for. This seems more realistic, and it
definitely will help in examples recently exhibited by Stefan
Kaltenbrunner. To get the total size of all the tables involved, we must
tweak the handling of 'append relations' a bit --- formerly we looked up
information about the child tables on-the-fly during set_append_rel_pathlist,
but it needs to be done before we start doing any cost estimation, so
push it into the add_base_rels_to_query scan.
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.
inheritance trees on-the-fly, which pretty well constrained us to considering
only one way of planning inheritance, expand inheritance sets during the
planner prep phase, and build a side data structure that can be consulted
later to find which RTEs are members of which inheritance sets. As proof of
concept, use the data structure to plan joins against inheritance sets more
efficiently: we can now use indexes on the set members in inner-indexscan
joins. (The generated plans could be improved further, but it'll take some
executor changes.) This data structure will also support handling UNION ALL
subqueries in the same way as inheritance sets, but that aspect of it isn't
finished yet.
Per my recent proposal. I ended up basing the implementation on the
existing mechanism for enforcing valid join orders of IN joins --- the
rules for valid outer-join orders are somewhat similar.
