| Age | Commit message (Collapse) | Author | 
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|  | as per my recent proposal:
1. Fold SortClause and GroupClause into a single node type SortGroupClause.
We were already relying on them to be struct-equivalent, so using two node
tags wasn't accomplishing much except to get in the way of comparing items
with equal().
2. Add an "eqop" field to SortGroupClause to carry the associated equality
operator.  This is cheap for the parser to get at the same time it's looking
up the sort operator, and storing it eliminates the need for repeated
not-so-cheap lookups during planning.  In future this will also let us
represent GROUP/DISTINCT operations on datatypes that have hash opclasses
but no btree opclasses (ie, they have equality but no natural sort order).
The previous representation simply didn't work for that, since its only
indicator of comparison semantics was a sort operator.
3. Add a hasDistinctOn boolean to struct Query to explicitly record whether
the distinctClause came from DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON.  This allows removing
some complicated and not 100% bulletproof code that attempted to figure
that out from the distinctClause alone.
This patch doesn't in itself create any new capability, but it's necessary
infrastructure for future attempts to use hash-based grouping for DISTINCT
and UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT. | 
|  | taking the maximum of any child rel's width, we should weight the widths
proportionally to the number of rows expected from each child.  In hindsight
this is obviously correct because row width is really a proxy for the total
physical size of the relation.  Per discussion with Scott Carey (bug #4264). | 
|  | the associated datatype as their equality member.  This means that these
opclasses can now support plain equality comparisons along with LIKE tests,
thus avoiding the need for an extra index in some applications.  This
optimization was not possible when the pattern opclasses were first introduced,
because we didn't insist that text equality meant bitwise equality; but we
do now, so there is no semantic difference between regular and pattern
equality operators.
I removed the name_pattern_ops opclass altogether, since it's really useless:
name's regular comparisons are just strcmp() and are unlikely to become
something different.  Instead teach indxpath.c that btree name_ops can be
used for LIKE whether or not the locale is C.  This might lead to a useful
speedup in LIKE queries on the system catalogs in non-C locales.
The ~=~ and ~<>~ operators are gone altogether.  (It would have been nice to
keep them for backward compatibility's sake, but since the pg_amop structure
doesn't allow multiple equality operators per opclass, there's no way.)
A not-immediately-obvious incompatibility is that the sort order within
bpchar_pattern_ops indexes changes --- it had been identical to plain
strcmp, but is now trailing-blank-insensitive.  This will impact
in-place upgrades, if those ever happen.
Per discussions a couple months ago. | 
|  | prefix matching using this facility.
Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov | 
|  | unnecessary #include lines in it.  Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style. | 
|  | no particular need to do get_op_opfamily_properties() while building an
indexscan plan.  Postpone that lookup until executor start.  This simplifies
createplan.c a lot more than it complicates nodeIndexscan.c, and makes things
more uniform since we already had to do it that way for RowCompare
expressions.  Should be a bit faster too, at least for plans that aren't
re-used many times, since we avoid palloc'ing and perhaps copying the
intermediate list data structure. | 
|  | eval_const_expressions needs to be passed the PlannerInfo ("root") structure,
because in some cases we want it to substitute values for Param nodes.
(So "constant" is not so constant as all that ...)  This mistake partially
disabled optimization of unnamed extended-Query statements in 8.3: in
particular the LIKE-to-indexscan optimization would never be applied if the
LIKE pattern was passed as a parameter, and constraint exclusion depending
on a parameter value didn't work either. | 
|  | Add some regression tests for plausible failures in this area. | 
|  | strings.  This patch introduces four support functions cstring_to_text,
cstring_to_text_with_len, text_to_cstring, and text_to_cstring_buffer, and
two macros CStringGetTextDatum and TextDatumGetCString.  A number of
existing macros that provided variants on these themes were removed.
Most of the places that need to make such conversions now require just one
function or macro call, in place of the multiple notational layers that used
to be needed.  There are no longer any direct calls of textout or textin,
and we got most of the places that were using handmade conversions via
memcpy (there may be a few still lurking, though).
This commit doesn't make any serious effort to eliminate transient memory
leaks caused by detoasting toasted text objects before they reach
text_to_cstring.  We changed PG_GETARG_TEXT_P to PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP in a few
places where it was easy, but much more could be done.
Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane | 
|  | knowledge up through any joins it participates in.  We were doing that already
in some special cases but not in the general case.  Also, defend against zero
row estimates for the input relations in cost_mergejoin --- this fix may have
eliminated the only scenario in which that can happen, but be safe.  Per
report from Alex Solovey. | 
|  |  | 
|  | into an iteration over three parallel lists, I had accidentally put the lnext
steps outside the loop.  Sigh.  Per bug #3938. | 
|  | for unhandled clause types ought to be 0.5, not 1.0.  I fear I introduced
this silliness due to misreading the intent of the very-poorly-structured
code that was there when we inherited the file from Berkeley.  The lack
of sanity in this behavior was exposed by an example from Sim Zacks.
(Arguably this is a bug fix and should be back-patched, but I'm a bit
hesitant to introduce a possible planner behavior change in the back
branches; it might detune queries that worked acceptably in the past.)
While at it, make estimation for DistinctExpr do something marginally
realistic, rather than just defaulting. | 
|  | 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. | 
|  | of poorer planning in 8.3 than 8.2:
1. After pushing a constant across an outer join --- ie, given
"a LEFT JOIN b ON (a.x = b.y) WHERE a.x = 42", we can deduce that b.y is
sort of equal to 42, in the sense that we needn't fetch any b rows where
it isn't 42 --- loop to see if any additional deductions can be made.
Previous releases did that by recursing, but I had mistakenly thought that
this was no longer necessary given the EquivalenceClass machinery.
2. Allow pushing constants across outer join conditions even if the
condition is outerjoin_delayed due to a lower outer join.  This is safe
as long as the condition is strict and we re-test it at the upper join.
3. Keep the outer-join clause even if we successfully push a constant
across it.  This is *necessary* in the outerjoin_delayed case, but
even in the simple case, it seems better to do this to ensure that the
join search order heuristics will consider the join as reasonable to
make.  Mark such a clause as having selectivity 1.0, though, since it's
not going to eliminate very many rows after application of the constant
condition.
4. Tweak have_relevant_eclass_joinclause to report that two relations
are joinable when they have vars that are equated to the same constant.
We won't actually generate any joinclause from such an EquivalenceClass,
but again it seems that in such a case it's a good idea to consider
the join as worth costing out.
5. Fix a bug in select_mergejoin_clauses that was exposed by these
changes: we have to reject candidate mergejoin clauses if either side was
equated to a constant, because we can't construct a canonical pathkey list
for such a clause.  This is an implementation restriction that might be
worth fixing someday, but it doesn't seem critical to get it done for 8.3. | 
|  |  | 
|  | the two join variables at both ends: not only trailing rows that need not be
scanned because there cannot be a match on the other side, but initial rows
that will be scanned without possibly having a match.  This allows a more
realistic estimate of startup cost to be made, per recent pgsql-performance
discussion.  In passing, fix a couple of bugs that had crept into
mergejoinscansel: it was not quite up to speed for the task of estimating
descending-order scans, which is a new requirement in 8.3. | 
|  | clauselist_selectivity skip some analysis that's useless when there's only
one clause in the given list.  Actually this can win even for not-so-simple
queries, because we also apply clauselist_selectivity to sublists such as the
quals matching an index; which are likely to have only a single entry even
when the total query is quite complicated. | 
|  | where the EquivalenceClass machinery is unable to deduce anything more from a
simple "var = const" qual clause.  There are probably some more cases where
this could be done, but this seems to take care of most of the added overhead
for simple queries.  Per gripe from Guillaume Smet.
In passing, fix a problem that was exposed by this change:
reconsider_outer_join_clause and friends were passing the wrong relids to
build_implied_join_equality, resulting in RestrictInfos with the wrong
required_relids.  This mistake was masked in typical cases since the bogus
RestrictInfos would never have escaped from the EquivalenceClass machinery,
but I think there might be corner cases involving "broken" ECs where there
would have been a visible failure even without the new optimization.  In any
case the code was certainly not operating as intended. | 
|  | avoid this problem in the future.) | 
|  |  | 
|  | predictable manner; in particular that if you say ORDER BY output-column-ref,
it will in fact sort by that specific column even if there are multiple
syntactic matches.  An example is
	SELECT random() AS a, random() AS b FROM ... ORDER BY b, a;
While the use-case for this might be a bit debatable, it worked as expected
in earlier releases, so we should preserve the behavior for 8.3.  Per my
recent proposal.
While at it, fix convert_subquery_pathkeys() to handle RelabelType stripping
in both directions; it needs this for the same reasons make_sort_from_pathkeys
does. | 
|  | to be able to discard top-level RelabelType nodes on *both* sides of the
equivalence-class-to-target-list comparison, since make_pathkey_from_sortinfo
might either add or remove a RelabelType.  Also fix the latter to do the
removal case cleanly.  Per example from Peter. | 
|  | make_greater_string() try harder to generate a string that's actually greater
than its input string.  Before we just assumed that making a string that was
memcmp-greater was enough, but it is easy to generate examples where this is
not so when the locale is not C.  Instead, loop until the relevant comparison
function agrees that the generated string is greater than the input.
Unfortunately this is probably not enough to guarantee that the generated
string is greater than all extensions of the input, so we cannot relax the
restriction to C locale for the LIKE/regex index optimization.  But it should
at least improve the odds of getting a useful selectivity estimate in
prefix_selectivity().  Per example from Guillaume Smet.
Backpatch to 8.1, mainly because that's what the complainant is using... | 
|  | RelabelType nodes when the sort key is binary-compatible with the sort
operator rather than having exactly its input type.  We did this correctly
for index columns but not sort keys, leading to failure to notice that
a varchar index matches an ORDER BY request.  This requires a bit more work
in make_sort_from_pathkeys, but not anyplace else that I can find.
Per bug report and subsequent discussion. | 
|  | This doubles the planning workload for mergejoins while not actually
accomplishing much.  The only useful case is where one of the directions
matches the query's ORDER BY request; therefore, put a thumb on the scales
in that direction, and otherwise arbitrarily consider only the ASC direction.
(This is a lot easier now than it would've been before 8.3, since we have
more semantic knowledge embedded in PathKeys now.) | 
|  | if either of the input relations can legally be joined to any other rels using
join clauses.  This avoids uselessly (and expensively) considering a lot of
really stupid join paths when there is a join restriction with a large
footprint, that is, lots of relations inside its LHS or RHS.  My patch of
15-Feb-2007 had been causing the code to consider joining *every* combination
of rels inside such a group, which is exponentially bad :-(.  With this
behavior, clauseless bushy joins will be done if necessary, but they'll be
put off as long as possible.  Per report from Jakub Ouhrabka.
Backpatch to 8.2.  We might someday want to backpatch to 8.1 as well, but 8.1
does not have the problem for OUTER JOIN nests, only for IN-clauses, so it's
not clear anyone's very likely to hit it in practice; and the current patch
doesn't apply cleanly to 8.1. | 
|  | then-delete on the current cursor row.  The basic fix is that nodeTidscan.c
has to apply heap_get_latest_tid() to the current-scan-TID obtained from the
cursor query; this ensures we get the latest row version to work with.
However, since that only works if the query plan is a TID scan, we also have
to hack the planner to make sure only that type of plan will be selected.
(Formerly, the planner might decide to apply a seqscan if the table is very
small.  This change is probably a Good Thing anyway, since it's hard to see
how a seqscan could really win.)  That means the execQual.c code to support
CurrentOfExpr as a regular expression type is dead code, so replace it with
just an elog().  Also, add regression tests covering these cases.  Note
that the added tests expose the fact that re-fetching an updated row
misbehaves if the cursor used FOR UPDATE.  That's an independent bug that
should be fixed later.  Per report from Dharmendra Goyal. | 
|  | join search order portion of the planner; this is specifically intended to
simplify developing a replacement for GEQO planning.  Patch by Julius
Stroffek, editorialized on by me.  I renamed make_one_rel_by_joins to
standard_join_search and make_rels_by_joins to join_search_one_level to better
reflect their place within this scheme. | 
|  | (because they are uncorrelated with the immediate parent query).  We were
charging the full run cost to the parent node, disregarding the fact that
only one row need be fetched for EXISTS.  While this would only be a
cosmetic issue in most cases, it might possibly affect planning outcomes
if the parent query were itself a subquery to some upper query.
Per recent discussion with Steve Crawford. | 
|  | the number of rows likely to be produced by a query such as
	SELECT * FROM t1 LEFT JOIN t2 USING (key) WHERE t2.key IS NULL;
What this is doing is selecting for t1 rows with no match in t2, and thus
it may produce a significant number of rows even if the t2.key table column
contains no nulls at all.  8.2 thinks the table column's null fraction is
relevant and thus may estimate no rows out, which results in terrible plans
if there are more joins above this one.  A proper fix for this will involve
passing much more information about the context of a clause to the selectivity
estimator functions than we ever have.  There's no time left to write such a
patch for 8.3, and it wouldn't be back-patchable into 8.2 anyway.  Instead,
put in an ad-hoc test to defeat the normal table-stats-based estimation when
an IS NULL test is evaluated at an outer join, and just use a constant
estimate instead --- I went with 0.5 for lack of a better idea.  This won't
catch every case but it will catch the typical ways of writing such queries,
and it seems unlikely to make things worse for other queries. | 
|  | 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. | 
|  | Along the way, allow FOR UPDATE in non-WITH-HOLD cursors; there may once
have been a reason to disallow that, but it seems to work now, and it's
really rather necessary if you want to select a row via a cursor and then
update it in a concurrent-safe fashion.
Original patch by Arul Shaji, rather heavily editorialized by Tom Lane. | 
|  | from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions.  These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible.  This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation.  Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane | 
|  | index key columns always have the type expected by the index's associated
operators, ie, we add RelabelType nodes when dealing with binary-compatible
index opclasses.  This is needed to get varchar indexes to play nicely with
the new EquivalenceClass machinery, as per recent gripe from Josh Berkus that
CVS HEAD was failing to match a varchar index column to a constant restriction
in the query.
It seems likely that this change will allow removal of a lot of ugly ad-hoc
RelabelType-stripping that the planner has traditionally done while matching
expressions to other expressions, but I'll worry about that some other day. | 
|  | inheritance child of an UPDATE/DELETE target relation can be excluded by
constraints.  I had rearranged some code in set_append_rel_pathlist() to
avoid "useless" work when a child is excluded, but overdid it and left
the child with no cheapest_path entry, causing possible failure later
if the appendrel was involved in a join.  Also, it seems that the dummy
plan generated by inheritance_planner() when all branches are excluded
has to be a bit less dummy now than was required in 8.2.
Per report from Jan Wieck.  Add his test case to the regression tests. | 
|  | cheapest-startup-cost innerjoin indexscans, and make joinpath.c consider
both of these (when different) as the inside of a nestloop join.  The
original design was based on the assumption that indexscan paths always
have negligible startup cost, and so total cost is the only important
figure of merit; an assumption that's obviously broken by bitmap
indexscans.  This oversight could lead to choosing poor plans in cases
where fast-start behavior is more important than total cost, such as
LIMIT and IN queries.  8.1-vintage brain fade exposed by an example from
Chuck D. | 
|  | is using mark/restore but not rewind or backward-scan capability.  Insert a
materialize plan node between a mergejoin and its inner child if the inner
child is a sort that is expected to spill to disk.  The materialize shields
the sort from the need to do mark/restore and thereby allows it to perform
its final merge pass on-the-fly; while the materialize itself is normally
cheap since it won't spill to disk unless the number of tuples with equal
key values exceeds work_mem.
Greg Stark, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane. | 
|  | 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. | 
|  | will be excluded by constraint exclusion anyway.  Greg Stark | 
|  | In very large queries this accounts for a noticeable fraction of
planning time.  Per an example from Greg Stark. | 
|  | competing alternatives for indexes to use in a bitmap scan.  The former
coding took estimated selectivity as an overriding factor, causing it to
sometimes choose indexes that were much slower to scan than ones with a
slightly worse selectivity.  It was also too narrow-minded about which
combinations of indexes to consider ANDing.  The rewrite makes it pay more
attention to index scan cost than selectivity; this seems sane since it's
impossible to have very bad selectivity with low cost, whereas the reverse
isn't true.  Also, we now consider each index alone, as well as adding
each index to an AND-group led by each prior index, for a total of about
O(N^2) rather than O(N) combinations considered.  This makes the results
much less dependent on the exact order in which the indexes are
considered.  It's still a lot cheaper than an O(2^N) exhaustive search.
A prefilter step eliminates all but the cheapest of those indexes using
the same set of WHERE conditions, to keep the effective value of N down in
scenarios where the DBA has created lots of partially-redundant indexes. | 
|  | possibly be any useful pathkeys --- to wit, queries with neither any
join clauses nor any ORDER BY request.  It's nearly free to check for
this case and it saves a useful fraction of the planning time for simple
queries. | 
|  | Teodor Sigaev, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane. | 
|  | seen by code inspecting the expression.  The best way to do this seems
to be to drop the original representation as a function invocation, and
instead make a special expression node type that represents applying
the element-type coercion function to each array element.  In this way
the element function is exposed and will be checked for volatility.
Per report from Guillaume Smet. | 
|  | First, genericcostestimate() was being way too liberal about including
partial-index conditions in its selectivity estimate, resulting in
substantial underestimates for situations such as an indexqual "x = 42"
used with an index on x "WHERE x >= 40 AND x < 50".  While the code is
intentionally set up to favor selecting partial indexes when available,
this was too much...
Second, choose_bitmap_and() was likewise easily fooled by cases of this
type, since it would similarly think that the partial index had selectivity
independent of the indexqual.
Fixed by using predicate_implied_by() rather than simple equality checks
to determine redundancy.  This is a good deal more expensive but I don't
see much alternative.  At least the extra cost is only paid when there's
actually a partial index under consideration.
Per report from Jeff Davis.  I'm not going to risk back-patching this,
though. | 
|  | available information about the typmod of an expression; namely, Const,
ArrayRef, ArrayExpr, and EXPR and ARRAY SubLinks.  In the ArrayExpr and
SubLink cases it wasn't really the data structure's fault, but exprTypmod()
being lazy.  This seems like a good idea in view of the expected increase in
typmod usage from Teodor's work to allow user-defined types to have typmods.
In particular this responds to the concerns we had about eliminating the
special-purpose hack that exprTypmod() used to have for BPCHAR Consts.
We can now tell whether or not such a Const has been cast to a specific
length, and report or display properly if so.
initdb forced due to changes in stored rules. | 
|  | useless substructure for its RangeTblEntry nodes.  (I chose to keep using the
same struct node type and just zero out the link fields for unneeded info,
rather than making a separate ExecRangeTblEntry type --- it seemed too
fragile to have two different rangetable representations.)
Along the way, put subplans into a list in the toplevel PlannedStmt node,
and have SubPlan nodes refer to them by list index instead of direct pointers.
Vadim wanted to do that years ago, but I never understood what he was on about
until now.  It makes things a *whole* lot more robust, because we can stop
worrying about duplicate processing of subplans during expression tree
traversals.  That's been a constant source of bugs, and it's finally gone.
There are some consequent simplifications yet to be made, like not using
a separate EState for subplans in the executor, but I'll tackle that later. | 
|  | storing mostly-redundant Query trees in prepared statements, portals, etc.
To replace Query, a new node type called PlannedStmt is inserted by the
planner at the top of a completed plan tree; this carries just the fields of
Query that are still needed at runtime.  The statement lists kept in portals
etc. now consist of intermixed PlannedStmt and bare utility-statement nodes
--- no Query.  This incidentally allows us to remove some fields from Query
and Plan nodes that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Still to do: simplify the execution-time range table; at the moment the
range table passed to the executor still contains Query trees for subqueries.
initdb forced due to change of stored rules. |