This SQL standard functionality allows to aggregate data by different
GROUP BY clauses at once. Each grouping set returns rows with columns
grouped by in other sets set to NULL.
This could previously be achieved by doing each grouping as a separate
query, conjoined by UNION ALLs. Besides being considerably more concise,
grouping sets will in many cases be faster, requiring only one scan over
the underlying data.
The current implementation of grouping sets only supports using sorting
for input. Individual sets that share a sort order are computed in one
pass. If there are sets that don't share a sort order, additional sort &
aggregation steps are performed. These additional passes are sourced by
the previous sort step; thus avoiding repeated scans of the source data.
The code is structured in a way that adding support for purely using
hash aggregation or a mix of hashing and sorting is possible. Sorting
was chosen to be supported first, as it is the most generic method of
implementation.
Instead of, as in an earlier versions of the patch, representing the
chain of sort and aggregation steps as full blown planner and executor
nodes, all but the first sort are performed inside the aggregation node
itself. This avoids the need to do some unusual gymnastics to handle
having to return aggregated and non-aggregated tuples from underlying
nodes, as well as having to shut down underlying nodes early to limit
memory usage. The optimizer still builds Sort/Agg node to describe each
phase, but they're not part of the plan tree, but instead additional
data for the aggregation node. They're a convenient and preexisting way
to describe aggregation and sorting. The first (and possibly only) sort
step is still performed as a separate execution step. That retains
similarity with existing group by plans, makes rescans fairly simple,
avoids very deep plans (leading to slow explains) and easily allows to
avoid the sorting step if the underlying data is sorted by other means.
A somewhat ugly side of this patch is having to deal with a grammar
ambiguity between the new CUBE keyword and the cube extension/functions
named cube (and rollup). To avoid breaking existing deployments of the
cube extension it has not been renamed, neither has cube been made a
reserved keyword. Instead precedence hacking is used to make GROUP BY
cube(..) refer to the CUBE grouping sets feature, and not the function
cube(). To actually group by a function cube(), unlikely as that might
be, the function name has to be quoted.
Needs a catversion bump because stored rules may change.
Author: Andrew Gierth and Atri Sharma, with contributions from Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Noah Misch, Tom Lane, Svenne Krap, Tomas
Vondra, Erik Rijkers, Marti Raudsepp, Pavel Stehule
Discussion: CAOeZVidmVRe2jU6aMk_5qkxnB7dfmPROzM7Ur8JPW5j8Y5X-Lw@mail.gmail.com
The folly of the previous arrangement was just demonstrated: there's no
convenient way to add fields to ExplainState without breaking ABI, even
if callers have no need to touch those fields. Since we might well need
to do that again someday in back branches, let's change things so that
only explain.c has to have sizeof(ExplainState) compiled into it. This
costs one extra palloc() per EXPLAIN operation, which is surely pretty
negligible.
As of 9.3, ruleutils.c goes to some lengths to ensure that table and column
aliases used in its output are unique. Of course this takes more time than
was required before, which in itself isn't fatal. However, EXPLAIN was set
up so that recalculation of the unique aliases was repeated for each
subexpression printed in a plan. That results in O(N^2) time and memory
consumption for large plan trees, which did not happen in older branches.
Fortunately, the expensive work is the same across a whole plan tree,
so there is no need to repeat it; we can do most of the initialization
just once per query and re-use it for each subexpression. This buys
back most (not all) of the performance loss since 9.2.
We need an extra ExplainState field to hold the precalculated deparse
context. That's no problem in HEAD, but in the back branches, expanding
sizeof(ExplainState) seems risky because third-party extensions might
have local variables of that struct type. So, in 9.4 and 9.3, introduce
an auxiliary struct to keep sizeof(ExplainState) the same. We should
refactor the APIs to avoid such local variables in future, but that's
material for a separate HEAD-only commit.
Per gripe from Alexey Bashtanov. Back-patch to 9.3 where the issue
was introduced.
We've gotten enough push-back on that change to make it clear that it
wasn't an especially good idea to do it like that. Revert plain EXPLAIN
to its previous behavior, but keep the extra output in EXPLAIN ANALYZE.
Per discussion.
Internally, I set this up as a separate flag ExplainState.summary that
controls printing of planning time and execution time. For now it's
just copied from the ANALYZE option, but we could consider exposing it
to users.
This doesn't work for prepared queries, but it's not too easy to get
the information in that case and there's some debate as to exactly
what the right thing to measure is, so just do this for now.
Andreas Karlsson, with slight doc changes by me.
Revert the matview-related changes in explain.c's API, as per recent
complaint from Robert Haas. The reason for these appears to have been
principally some ill-considered choices around having intorel_startup do
what ought to be parse-time checking, plus a poor arrangement for passing
it the view parsetree it needs to store into pg_rewrite when creating a
materialized view. Do the latter by having parse analysis stick a copy
into the IntoClause, instead of doing it at runtime. (On the whole,
I seriously question the choice to represent CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW as a
variant of SELECT INTO/CREATE TABLE AS, because that means injecting even
more complexity into what was already a horrid legacy kluge. However,
I didn't go so far as to rethink that choice ... yet.)
I also moved several error checks into matview parse analysis, and
made the check for external Params in a matview more accurate.
In passing, clean things up a bit more around interpretOidsOption(),
and fix things so that we can use that to force no-oids for views,
sequences, etc, thereby eliminating the need to cons up "oids = false"
options when creating them.
catversion bump due to change in IntoClause. (I wonder though if we
really need readfuncs/outfuncs support for IntoClause anymore.)
The materialized views patch adjusted ExplainOneQuery to take an
additional DestReceiver argument, but failed to add a matching
argument to the definition of ExplainOneQuery_hook. This is a
problem for users of the hook that want to call ExplainOnePlan.
Fix by adding the missing argument.
A materialized view has a rule just like a view and a heap and
other physical properties like a table. The rule is only used to
populate the table, references in queries refer to the
materialized data.
This is a minimal implementation, but should still be useful in
many cases. Currently data is only populated "on demand" by the
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW and REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW statements.
It is expected that future releases will add incremental updates
with various timings, and that a more refined concept of defining
what is "fresh" data will be developed. At some point it may even
be possible to have queries use a materialized in place of
references to underlying tables, but that requires the other
above-mentioned features to be working first.
Much of the documentation work by Robert Haas.
Review by Noah Misch, Thom Brown, Robert Haas, Marko Tiikkaja
Security review by KaiGai Kohei, with a decision on how best to
implement sepgsql still pending.
The previous scheme had bugs in some corner cases involving tables that had
been renamed since a view was made. This could result in dumped views that
failed to reload or reloaded incorrectly, as seen in bug #7553 from Lloyd
Albin, as well as in some pgsql-hackers discussion back in January. Also,
its behavior for printing EXPLAIN plans was sometimes confusing because of
willingness to use the same alias for multiple RTEs (it was Ashutosh
Bapat's complaint about that aspect that started the January thread).
To fix, ensure that each RTE in the query has a unique unqualified alias,
by modifying the alias if necessary (we add "_" and digits as needed to
create a non-conflicting name). Then we can just print its variables with
that alias, avoiding the confusing and bug-prone scheme of sometimes
schema-qualifying variable names. In EXPLAIN, it proves to be expedient to
take the further step of only assigning such aliases to RTEs that are
actually referenced in the query, since the planner has a habit of
generating extra RTEs with the same alias in situations such as
inheritance-tree expansion.
Although this fixes a bug of very long standing, I'm hesitant to back-patch
such a noticeable behavioral change. My experiments while creating a
regression test convinced me that actually incorrect output (as opposed to
confusing output) occurs only in very narrow cases, which is backed up by
the lack of previous complaints from the field. So we may be better off
living with it in released branches; and in any case it'd be smart to let
this ripen awhile in HEAD before we consider back-patching it.
The heapam XLog functions are used by other modules, not all of which
are interested in the rest of the heapam API. With this, we let them
get just the XLog stuff in which they are interested and not pollute
them with unrelated includes.
Also, since heapam.h no longer requires xlog.h, many files that do
include heapam.h no longer get xlog.h automatically, including a few
headers. This is useful because heapam.h is getting pulled in by
execnodes.h, which is in turn included by a lot of files.
Making this operation look like a utility statement seems generally a good
idea, and particularly so in light of the desire to provide command
triggers for utility statements. The original choice of representing it as
SELECT with an IntoClause appendage had metastasized into rather a lot of
places, unfortunately, so that this patch is a great deal more complicated
than one might at first expect.
In particular, keeping EXPLAIN working for SELECT INTO and CREATE TABLE AS
subcommands required restructuring some EXPLAIN-related APIs. Add-on code
that calls ExplainOnePlan or ExplainOneUtility, or uses
ExplainOneQuery_hook, will need adjustment.
Also, the cases PREPARE ... SELECT INTO and CREATE RULE ... SELECT INTO,
which formerly were accepted though undocumented, are no longer accepted.
The PREPARE case can be replaced with use of CREATE TABLE AS EXECUTE.
The CREATE RULE case doesn't seem to have much real-world use (since the
rule would work only once before failing with "table already exists"),
so we'll not bother with that one.
Both SELECT INTO and CREATE TABLE AS still return a command tag of
"SELECT nnnn". There was some discussion of returning "CREATE TABLE nnnn",
but for the moment backwards compatibility wins the day.
Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Sometimes it may be useful to get actual row counts out of EXPLAIN
(ANALYZE) without paying the cost of timing every node entry/exit.
With this patch, you can say EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, TIMING OFF) to get that.
Tomas Vondra, reviewed by Eric Theise, with minor doc changes by me.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
This patch also removes buffer-usage statistics from the track_counts
output, since this (or the global server statistics) is deemed to be a better
interface to this information.
Itagaki Takahiro, reviewed by Euler Taveira de Oliveira.
Without these functions, anyone outside of explain.c can't actually use
ExplainPrintPlan, because the ExplainState won't be initialized properly.
The user-visible result of this was a crash when using auto_explain with
the JSON output format.
Report by Euler Taveira de Oliveira. Analysis by Tom Lane. Patch by me.
The original syntax made it difficult to add options without making them
into reserved words. This change parenthesizes the options to avoid that
problem, and makes provision for an explicit (and perhaps non-Boolean)
value for each option. The original syntax is still supported, but only
for the two original options ANALYZE and VERBOSE.
As a test case, add a COSTS option that can suppress the planner cost
estimates. This may be useful for including EXPLAIN output in the regression
tests, which are otherwise unable to cope with cross-platform variations in
cost estimates.
Robert Haas
practically free given prior 8.4 changes in plancache and portal management,
and it makes it a lot easier for ExecutorStart/Run/End hooks to get at the
query text. Extracted from Itagaki Takahiro's pg_stat_statements patch,
with minor editorialization.
* Refactor explain.c slightly to export a convenient-to-use subroutine
for printing EXPLAIN results.
* Provide hooks for plugins to get control at ExecutorStart and ExecutorEnd
as well as ExecutorRun.
* Add some minimal support for tracking the total runtime of ExecutorRun.
This code won't actually do anything unless a plugin prods it to.
* Change the API of the DefineCustomXXXVariable functions to allow nonzero
"flags" to be specified for a custom GUC variable. While at it, also make
the "bootstrap" default value for custom GUCs be explicitly specified as a
parameter to these functions. This is to eliminate confusion over where the
default comes from, as has been expressed in the past by some users of the
custom-variable facility.
* Refactor GUC code a bit to ensure that a custom variable gets initialized to
something valid (like its default value) even if the placeholder value was
invalid.
and/or create plans for hypothetical situations; in particular, investigate
plans that would be generated using hypothetical indexes. This is a
heavily-rewritten version of the hooks proposed by Gurjeet Singh for his
Index Advisor project. In this formulation, the index advisor can be
entirely a loadable module instead of requiring a significant part to be
in the core backend, and plans can be generated for hypothetical indexes
without requiring the creation and rolling-back of system catalog entries.
The index advisor patch as-submitted is not compatible with these hooks,
but it needs significant work anyway due to other 8.2-to-8.3 planner
changes. With these hooks in the core backend, development of the advisor
can proceed as a pgfoundry project.
module and teach PREPARE and protocol-level prepared statements to use it.
In service of this, rearrange utility-statement processing so that parse
analysis does not assume table schemas can't change before execution for
utility statements (necessary because we don't attempt to re-acquire locks
for utility statements when reusing a stored plan). This requires some
refactoring of the ProcessUtility API, but it ends up cleaner anyway,
for instance we can get rid of the QueryContext global.
Still to do: fix up SPI and related code to use the plan cache; I'm tempted to
try to make SQL functions use it too. Also, there are at least some aspects
of system state that we want to ensure remain the same during a replan as in
the original processing; search_path certainly ought to behave that way for
instance, and perhaps there are others.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
