Restructure code that is responsible for ensuring that clauseless joins are

considered when it is necessary to do so because of a join-order restriction
(that is, an outer-join or IN-subselect construct).  The former coding was a
bit ad-hoc and inconsistent, and it missed some cases, as exposed by Mario
Weilguni's recent bug report.  His specific problem was that an IN could be
turned into a "clauseless" join due to constant-propagation removing the IN's
joinclause, and if the IN's subselect involved more than one relation and
there was more than one such IN linking to the same upper relation, then the
only valid join orders involve "bushy" plans but we would fail to consider the
specific paths needed to get there.  (See the example case added to the join
regression test.)  On examining the code I wonder if there weren't some other
problem cases too; in particular it seems that GEQO was defending against a
different set of corner cases than the main planner was.  There was also an
efficiency problem, in that when we did realize we needed a clauseless join
because of an IN, we'd consider clauseless joins against every other relation
whether this was sensible or not.  It seems a better design is to use the
outer-join and in-clause lists as a backup heuristic, just as the rule of
joining only where there are joinclauses is a heuristic: we'll join two
relations if they have a usable joinclause *or* this might be necessary to
satisfy an outer-join or IN-clause join order restriction.  I refactored the
code to have just one place considering this instead of three, and made sure
that it covered all the cases that any of them had been considering.

Backpatch as far as 8.1 (which has only the IN-clause form of the disease).
By rights 8.0 and 7.4 should have the bug too, but they accidentally fail
to fail, because the joininfo structure used in those releases preserves some
memory of there having once been a joinclause between the inner and outer
sides of an IN, and so it leads the code in the right direction anyway.
I'll be conservative and not touch them.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 19 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c b/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c
index 555ae296092..9b7fd2848bd 100644
--- a/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c
+++ b/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2005, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1994, Regents of the University of California
  *
- * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c,v 1.77.2.1 2005/11/22 18:23:10 momjian Exp $
+ * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/backend/optimizer/geqo/geqo_eval.c,v 1.77.2.2 2007/02/16 00:14:16 tgl Exp $
  *
  *-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  */
@@ -254,28 +254,14 @@ static bool
 desirable_join(PlannerInfo *root,
 			   RelOptInfo *outer_rel, RelOptInfo *inner_rel)
 {
-	ListCell   *l;
-
 	/*
-	 * Join if there is an applicable join clause.
+	 * Join if there is an applicable join clause, or if there is a join
+	 * order restriction forcing these rels to be joined.
 	 */
-	if (have_relevant_joinclause(outer_rel, inner_rel))
+	if (have_relevant_joinclause(outer_rel, inner_rel) ||
+		have_join_order_restriction(root, outer_rel, inner_rel))
 		return true;
 
-	/*
-	 * Join if the rels are members of the same IN sub-select.	This is needed
-	 * to improve the odds that we will find a valid solution in a case where
-	 * an IN sub-select has a clauseless join.
-	 */
-	foreach(l, root->in_info_list)
-	{
-		InClauseInfo *ininfo = (InClauseInfo *) lfirst(l);
-
-		if (bms_is_subset(outer_rel->relids, ininfo->righthand) &&
-			bms_is_subset(inner_rel->relids, ininfo->righthand))
-			return true;
-	}
-
 	/* Otherwise postpone the join till later. */
 	return false;
 }