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2007-11-02Ensure that EquivalenceClasses generated from ORDER BY keys contain properTom Lane
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.
2007-10-27Avoid considering both sort directions as equally useful for merging.Tom Lane
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.)
2007-10-26Change have_join_order_restriction() so that we do not force a clauseless joinTom Lane
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.
2007-10-24Fix an error in make_outerjoininfo introduced by my patch of 30-Aug: the codeTom Lane
neglected to test whether an outer join's join-condition actually refers to the lower outer join it is looking at. (The comment correctly described what was supposed to happen, but the code didn't do it...) This often resulted in adding an unnecessary constraint on the join order of the two outer joins, which was bad enough. However, it also seems to expose a performance problem in an older patch (from 15-Feb): once we've decided that there is a join ordering constraint, we will start trying clauseless joins between every combination of rels within the constraint, which pointlessly eats up lots of time and space if there are numerous rels below the outer join. That probably needs to be revisited :-(. Per gripe from Jakub Ouhrabka.
2007-10-24Fix UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF to support repeated update and update-Tom Lane
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.
2007-10-22Remove an Assert that's been obsoleted by recent changes in the parsetreeTom Lane
representation of DECLARE CURSOR. Report and fix by Heikki.
2007-10-13Teach planagg.c that partial indexes specifying WHERE foo IS NOT NULL can beTom Lane
used to perform MIN(foo) or MAX(foo), since we want to discard null rows in the indexscan anyway. (This would probably fall out for free if we were injecting the IS NOT NULL clause somewhere earlier, but given the current anatomy of the MIN/MAX optimization code we have to do it explicitly. Fortunately, very little added code is needed.) Per a discussion with Henk de Wit.
2007-10-11Ensure that the result of evaluating a function during constant-expressionTom Lane
simplification gets detoasted before it is incorporated into a Const node. Otherwise, if an immutable function were to return a TOAST pointer (an unlikely case, but it can be made to happen), we would end up with a plan that depends on the continued existence of the out-of-line toast datum.
2007-10-11Fix the plan-invalidation mechanism to treat regclass constants that refer toTom Lane
a relation as a reason to invalidate a plan when the relation changes. This handles scenarios such as dropping/recreating a sequence that is referenced by nextval('seq') in a cached plan. Rather than teach plancache.c all about digging through plan trees to find regclass Consts, we charge the planner's setrefs.c with making a list of the relation OIDs on which each plan depends. That way the list can be built cheaply during a plan tree traversal that has to happen anyway. Per bug #3662 and subsequent discussion.
2007-10-04Keep the planner from failing on "WHERE false AND something IN (SELECT ...)".Tom Lane
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.
2007-09-26Create a function variable "join_search_hook" to let plugins override theTom Lane
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.
2007-09-22Fix cost estimates for EXISTS subqueries that are evaluated as initPlansTom Lane
(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.
2007-09-20HOT updates. When we update a tuple without changing any of its indexedTom Lane
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer generate extra index entries for the new version. Instead, index searches follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version. In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space. VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however. Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
2007-09-06Make eval_const_expressions() preserve typmod when simplifying something likeTom Lane
null::char(3) to a simple Const node. (It already worked for non-null values, but not when we skipped evaluation of a strict coercion function.) This prevents loss of typmod knowledge in situations such as exhibited in bug #3598. Unfortunately there seems no good way to fix that bug in 8.1 and 8.2, because they simply don't carry a typmod for a plain Const node. In passing I made all the other callers of makeNullConst supply "real" typmod values too, though I think it probably doesn't matter anywhere else.
2007-09-03Implement function-local GUC parameter settings, as per recent discussion.Tom Lane
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation is a bit spartan, too.
2007-08-31Apply a band-aid fix for the problem that 8.2 and up completely misestimateTom Lane
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.
2007-08-31Rewrite make_outerjoininfo's construction of min_lefthand and min_righthandTom Lane
sets for outer joins, in the light of bug #3588 and additional thought and experimentation. The original methodology was fatally flawed for nests of more than two outer joins: it got the relationships between adjacent joins right, but didn't always come to the right conclusions about whether a join could be interchanged with one two or more levels below it. This was largely caused by a mistaken idea that we should use the min_lefthand + min_righthand sets of a sub-join as the minimum left or right input set of an upper join when we conclude that the sub-join can't commute with the upper one. If there's a still-lower join that the sub-join *can* commute with, this method led us to think that that one could commute with the topmost join; which it can't. Another problem (not directly connected to bug #3588) was that make_outerjoininfo's processing-order-dependent method for enforcing outer join identity #3 didn't work right: if we decided that join A could safely commute with lower join B, we dropped all information about sub-joins under B that join A could perhaps not safely commute with, because we removed B's entire min_righthand from A's. To fix, make an explicit computation of all inner join combinations that occur below an outer join, and add to that the full syntactic relsets of any lower outer joins that we determine it can't commute with. This method gives much more direct enforcement of the outer join rearrangement identities, and it turns out not to cost a lot of additional bookkeeping. Thanks to Richard Harris for the bug report and test case.
2007-08-26Make ARRAY(SELECT ...) return an empty array, rather than a NULL, when theTom Lane
sub-select returns zero rows. Per complaint from Jens Schicke. Since this is more in the nature of a definition change than a bug, not back-patched.
2007-07-24Fix predicate-proving logic to cope with binary-compatibility cases whenTom Lane
checking whether an IS NULL/IS NOT NULL clause is implied or refuted by a strict function. Per example from Dawid Kuroczko. Backpatch to 8.2 since this is arguably a performance bug.
2007-07-18Fix an old thinko in SS_make_initplan_from_plan, which is used when optimizingTom Lane
a MIN or MAX aggregate call into an indexscan: the initplan is being made at the current query nesting level and so we shouldn't increment query_level. Though usually harmless, this mistake could lead to bogus "plan should not reference subplan's variable" failures on complex queries. Per bug report from David Sanchez i Gregori.
2007-07-12Fix mistaken Assert in adjust_appendrel_attr_needed, per Greg Stark.Tom Lane
2007-07-07Fix a couple of planner bugs introduced by the new ability to discardTom Lane
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.
2007-06-23Separate parse-analysis for utility commands out of parser/analyze.cTom Lane
(which now deals only in optimizable statements), and put that code into a new file parser/parse_utilcmd.c. This helps clarify and enforce the design rule that utility statements shouldn't be processed during the regular parse analysis phase; all interpretation of their meaning should happen after they are given to ProcessUtility to execute. (We need this because we don't retain any locks for a utility statement that's in a plan cache, nor have any way to detect that it's stale.) We are also able to simplify the API for parse_analyze() and related routines, because they will now always return exactly one Query structure. In passing, fix bug #3403 concerning trying to add a serial column to an existing temp table (this is largely Heikki's work, but we needed all that restructuring to make it safe).
2007-06-11Support UPDATE/DELETE WHERE CURRENT OF cursor_name, per SQL standard.Tom Lane
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.
2007-06-05Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the onesTom 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
2007-05-31Change build_index_pathkeys() so that the expressions it builds to representTom 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.
2007-05-26Repair two constraint-exclusion corner cases triggered by proving that anTom Lane
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.
2007-05-25Create hooks to let a loadable plugin monitor (or even replace) the plannerTom Lane
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.
2007-05-22Repair planner bug introduced in 8.2 by ability to rearrange outer joins:Tom Lane
in cases where a sub-SELECT inserts a WHERE clause between two outer joins, that clause may prevent us from re-ordering the two outer joins. The code was considering only the joins' own ON-conditions in determining reordering safety, which is not good enough. Add a "delay_upper_joins" flag to OuterJoinInfo to flag that we have detected such a clause and higher-level outer joins shouldn't be permitted to commute with this one. (This might seem overly coarse, but given the current rules for OJ reordering, it's sufficient AFAICT.) The failure case is actually pretty narrow: it needs a WHERE clause within the RHS of a left join that checks the RHS of a lower left join, but is not strict for that RHS (else we'd have simplified the lower join to a plain join). Even then no failure will be manifest unless the planner chooses to rearrange the join order. Per bug report from Adam Terrey.
2007-05-22Fix best_inner_indexscan to return both the cheapest-total-cost andTom Lane
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.
2007-05-21Teach tuplestore.c to throw away data before the "mark" point when the callerTom Lane
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.
2007-05-12Improve predicate_refuted_by_simple_clause() to handle IS NULL and IS NOT NULLTom Lane
more completely. The motivation for having it understand IS NULL at all was to allow use of "foo IS NULL" as one of the subsets of a partitioning on "foo", but as reported by Aleksander Kmetec, it wasn't really getting the job done. Backpatch to 8.2 since this is arguably a performance bug.
2007-05-04Teach tuplesort.c about "top N" sorting, in which only the first N tuplesTom 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.
2007-05-01Fix a thinko in my patch of a couple months ago for bug #3116: it did theTom Lane
wrong thing when inlining polymorphic SQL functions, because it was using the function's declared return type where it should have used the actual result type of the current call. In 8.1 and 8.2 this causes obvious failures even if you don't have assertions turned on; in 8.0 and 7.4 it would only be a problem if the inlined expression were used as an input to a function that did run-time type determination on its inputs. Add a regression test, since this is evidently an under-tested area.
2007-04-30Marginal performance hack: use a dedicated routine instead of copyObjectTom Lane
to copy nodes that are known to be Vars during plan reference adjustment. Saves useless memzero operation as well as the big switch in copyObject.
2007-04-30Marginal performance hack: avoid unnecessary work in expression_tree_mutator.Tom Lane
We can just palloc, instead of using makeNode, when we are going to overwrite the whole node anyway in the FLATCOPY macro. Also, use FLATCOPY instead of copyObject for common node types Var and Const.
2007-04-27Modify processing of DECLARE CURSOR and EXPLAIN so that they can resolve theTom Lane
types of unspecified parameters when submitted via extended query protocol. This worked in 8.2 but I had broken it during plancache changes. DECLARE CURSOR is now treated almost exactly like a plain SELECT through parse analysis, rewrite, and planning; only just before sending to the executor do we divert it away to ProcessUtility. This requires a special-case check in a number of places, but practically all of them were already special-casing SELECT INTO, so it's not too ugly. (Maybe it would be a good idea to merge the two by treating IntoClause as a form of utility statement? Not going to worry about that now, though.) That approach doesn't work for EXPLAIN, however, so for that I punted and used a klugy solution of running parse analysis an extra time if under extended query protocol.
2007-04-21Some further performance tweaks for planning large inheritance trees thatTom Lane
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.
2007-04-21Avoid useless work during set_plain_rel_pathlist() when the relationTom Lane
will be excluded by constraint exclusion anyway. Greg Stark
2007-04-21Tweak make_inh_translation_lists() to check the common case wherein parent andTom Lane
child attnums are the same, before it grovels through each and every child column looking for a name match. Saves some time in large inheritance trees, per example from Greg.
2007-04-21Tweak set_rel_width() to avoid redundant executions of getrelid().Tom Lane
In very large queries this accounts for a noticeable fraction of planning time. Per an example from Greg Stark.
2007-04-17Rewrite choose_bitmap_and() to make it more robust in the presence ofTom Lane
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.
2007-04-16Expose more cursor-related functionality in SPI: specifically, allowTom Lane
access to the planner's cursor-related planning options, and provide new FETCH/MOVE routines that allow access to the full power of those commands. Small refactoring of planner(), pg_plan_query(), and pg_plan_queries() APIs to make it convenient to pass the planning options down from SPI. This is the core-code portion of Pavel Stehule's patch for scrollable cursor support in plpgsql; I'll review and apply the plpgsql changes separately.
2007-04-15Avoid running build_index_pathkeys() in situations where there cannotTom Lane
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.
2007-04-06Don't remove the 'alias' field from flattened rangetable entries;Tom Lane
there are some corner cases where this is needed by ruleutils.c for proper display of variables during EXPLAIN.
2007-04-06Make 'col IS NULL' clauses be indexable conditions.Tom Lane
Teodor Sigaev, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane.
2007-04-02Support enum data types. Along the way, use macros for the values ofTom Lane
pg_type.typtype whereever practical. Tom Dunstan, with some kibitzing from Tom Lane.
2007-03-27Fix array coercion expressions to ensure that the correct volatility isTom 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.
2007-03-21Fix some problems with selectivity estimation for partial indexes.Tom Lane
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.
2007-03-17Fix up the remaining places where the expression node structure would loseTom Lane
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.