The planner logic that attempted to make a preliminary estimate of the
ph_needed levels for PlaceHolderVars seems to be completely broken by
lateral references. Fortunately, the potential join order optimization
that this code supported seems to be of relatively little value in
practice; so let's just get rid of it rather than trying to fix it.
Getting rid of this allows fairly substantial simplifications in
placeholder.c, too, so planning in such cases should be a bit faster.
Issue noted while pursuing bugs reported by Jeremy Evans and Antonin
Houska, though this doesn't in itself fix either of their reported cases.
What this does do is prevent an Assert crash in the kind of query
illustrated by the added regression test. (I'm not sure that the plan for
that query is stable enough across platforms to be usable as a regression
test output ... but we'll soon find out from the buildfarm.)
Back-patch to 9.3. The problem case can't arise without LATERAL, so
no need to touch older branches.
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.
If the right-hand side of a semijoin is unique, then we can treat it like a
normal join (or another way to say that is: we don't need to explicitly
unique-ify the data before doing it as a normal join). We were recognizing
such cases when the RHS was a sub-query with appropriate DISTINCT or GROUP
BY decoration, but there's another way: if the RHS is a plain relation with
unique indexes, we can check if any of the indexes prove the output is
unique. Most of the infrastructure for that was there already in the join
removal code, though I had to rearrange it a bit. Per reflection about a
recent example in pgsql-performance.
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.
