As of commit a87c72915 (which later got backpatched as far as 9.1),
we're explicitly supporting the notion that append relations can be
nested; this can occur when UNION ALL constructs are nested, or when
a UNION ALL contains a table with inheritance children.
Bug #11457 from Nelson Page, as well as an earlier report from Elvis
Pranskevichus, showed that there were still nasty bugs associated with such
cases: in particular the EquivalenceClass mechanism could try to generate
"join" clauses connecting an appendrel child to some grandparent appendrel,
which would result in assertion failures or bogus plans.
Upon investigation I concluded that all current callers of
find_childrel_appendrelinfo() need to be fixed to explicitly consider
multiple levels of parent appendrels. The most complex fix was in
processing of "broken" EquivalenceClasses, which are ECs for which we have
been unable to generate all the derived equality clauses we would like to
because of missing cross-type equality operators in the underlying btree
operator family. That code path is more or less entirely untested by
the regression tests to date, because no standard opfamilies have such
holes in them. So I wrote a new regression test script to try to exercise
it a bit, which turned out to be quite a worthwhile activity as it exposed
existing bugs in all supported branches.
The present patch is essentially the same as far back as 9.2, which is
where parameterized paths were introduced. In 9.0 and 9.1, we only need
to back-patch a small fragment of commit 5b7b5518d, which fixes failure to
propagate out the original WHERE clauses when a broken EC contains constant
members. (The regression test case results show that these older branches
are noticeably stupider than 9.2+ in terms of the quality of the plans
generated; but we don't really care about plan quality in such cases,
only that the plan not be outright wrong. A more invasive fix in the
older branches would not be a good idea anyway from a plan-stability
standpoint.)
When we committed a87c729153, we somehow
failed to notice that it didn't merely improve plan quality for expression
indexes; there were very closely related cases that failed outright with
"could not find pathkey item to sort". The failing cases seem to be those
where the planner was already capable of selecting a MergeAppend plan,
and there was inheritance involved: the lack of appropriate eclass child
members would prevent prepare_sort_from_pathkeys() from succeeding on the
MergeAppend's child plan nodes for inheritance child tables.
Accordingly, back-patch into 9.1 through 9.3, along with an extra
regression test case covering the problem.
Per trouble report from Michael Glaesemann.
This was not changed in HEAD, but will be done later as part of a
pgindent run. Future pgindent runs will also do this.
Report by Tom Lane
Backpatch through all supported branches, but not HEAD
Bug #8591 from Claudio Freire demonstrates that get_eclass_for_sort_expr
must be able to compute valid em_nullable_relids for any new equivalence
class members it creates. I'd worried about this in the commit message
for db9f0e1d9a, but claimed that it wasn't a
problem because multi-member ECs should already exist when it runs. That
is transparently wrong, though, because this function is also called by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses, which runs during deconstruct_jointree.
The example given in the bug report (which the new regression test item
is based upon) fails because the COALESCE() expression is first seen by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses rather than process_equivalence.
Fixing this requires passing the appropriate nullable_relids set to
get_eclass_for_sort_expr, and it requires new code to compute that set
for top-level expressions such as ORDER BY, GROUP BY, etc. We store
the top-level nullable_relids in a new field in PlannerInfo to avoid
computing it many times. In the back branches, I've added the new
field at the end of the struct to minimize ABI breakage for planner
plugins. There doesn't seem to be a good alternative to changing
get_eclass_for_sort_expr's API signature, though. There probably aren't
any third-party extensions calling that function directly; moreover,
if there are, they probably need to think about what to pass for
nullable_relids anyway.
Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch in this area.
This patch gets rid of the concept of, and infrastructure for,
non-canonical PathKeys; we now only ever create canonical pathkey lists.
The need for non-canonical pathkeys came from the desire to have
grouping_planner initialize query_pathkeys and related pathkey lists before
calling query_planner. However, since query_planner didn't actually *do*
anything with those lists before they'd been made canonical, we can get rid
of the whole mess by just not creating the lists at all until the point
where we formerly canonicalized them.
There are several ways in which we could implement that without making
query_planner itself deal with grouping/sorting features (which are
supposed to be the province of grouping_planner). I chose to add a
callback function to query_planner's API; other alternatives would have
required adding more fields to PlannerInfo, which while not bad in itself
would create an ABI break for planner-related plugins in the 9.2 release
series. This still breaks ABI for anything that calls query_planner
directly, but it seems somewhat unlikely that there are any such plugins.
I had originally conceived of this change as merely a step on the way to
fixing bug #8049 from Teun Hoogendoorn; but it turns out that this fixes
that bug all by itself, as per the added regression test. The reason is
that now get_eclass_for_sort_expr is adding the ORDER BY expression at the
end of EquivalenceClass creation not the start, and so anything that is in
a multi-member EquivalenceClass has already been created with correct
em_nullable_relids. I am suspicious that there are related scenarios in
which we still need to teach get_eclass_for_sort_expr to compute correct
nullable_relids, but am not eager to risk destabilizing either 9.2 or 9.3
to fix bugs that are only hypothetical. So for the moment, do this and
stop here.
Back-patch to 9.2 but not to earlier branches, since they don't exhibit
this bug for lack of join-clause-movement logic that depends on
em_nullable_relids being correct. (We might have to revisit that choice
if any related bugs turn up.) In 9.2, don't change the signature of
make_pathkeys_for_sortclauses nor remove canonicalize_pathkeys, so as
not to risk more plugin breakage than we have to.
In a query such as "SELECT DISTINCT min(x) FROM tab", the DISTINCT is
pretty useless (there being only one output row), but nonetheless it
shouldn't fail. But it could fail if "tab" is an inheritance parent,
because planagg.c's code for fixing up equivalence classes after making the
index-optimized MIN/MAX transformation wasn't prepared to find child-table
versions of the aggregate expression. The least ugly fix seems to be
to add an option to mutate_eclass_expressions() to skip child-table
equivalence class members, which aren't used anymore at this stage of
planning so it's not really necessary to fix them. Since child members
are ignored in many cases already, it seems plausible for
mutate_eclass_expressions() to have an option to ignore them too.
Per bug #7703 from Maxim Boguk.
Back-patch to 9.1. Although the same code exists before that, it cannot
encounter child-table aggregates AFAICS, because the index optimization
transformation cannot succeed on inheritance trees before 9.1 (for lack
of MergeAppend).
generate_base_implied_equalities_const() should prefer plain Consts over
other em_is_const eclass members when choosing the "pivot" value that
all the other members will be equated to. This makes it more likely that
the generated equalities will be useful in constraint-exclusion proofs.
Per report from Rushabh Lathia.
If a potential equivalence clause references a variable from the nullable
side of an outer join, the planner needs to take care that derived clauses
are not pushed to below the outer join; else they may use the wrong value
for the variable. (The problem arises only with non-strict clauses, since
if an upper clause can be proven strict then the outer join will get
simplified to a plain join.) The planner attempted to prevent this type
of error by checking that potential equivalence clauses aren't
outerjoin-delayed as a whole, but actually we have to check each side
separately, since the two sides of the clause will get moved around
separately if it's treated as an equivalence. Bugs of this type can be
demonstrated as far back as 7.4, even though releases before 8.3 had only
a very ad-hoc notion of equivalence clauses.
In addition, we neglected to account for the possibility that such clauses
might have nonempty nullable_relids even when not outerjoin-delayed; so the
equivalence-class machinery lacked logic to compute correct nullable_relids
values for clauses it constructs. This oversight was harmless before 9.2
because we were only using RestrictInfo.nullable_relids for OR clauses;
but as of 9.2 it could result in pushing constructed equivalence clauses
to incorrect places. (This accounts for bug #7604 from Bill MacArthur.)
Fix the first problem by adding a new test check_equivalence_delay() in
distribute_qual_to_rels, and fix the second one by adding code in
equivclass.c and called functions to set correct nullable_relids for
generated clauses. Although I believe the second part of this is not
currently necessary before 9.2, I chose to back-patch it anyway, partly to
keep the logic similar across branches and partly because it seems possible
we might find other reasons why we need valid values of nullable_relids in
the older branches.
Add regression tests illustrating these problems. In 9.0 and up, also
add test cases checking that we can push constants through outer joins,
since we've broken that optimization before and I nearly broke it again
with an overly simplistic patch for this problem.
This patch adjusts the treatment of parameterized paths so that all paths
with the same parameterization (same set of required outer rels) for the
same relation will have the same rowcount estimate. We cache the rowcount
estimates to ensure that property, and hopefully save a few cycles too.
Doing this makes it practical for add_path_precheck to operate without
a rowcount estimate: it need only assume that paths with different
parameterizations never dominate each other, which is close enough to
true anyway for coarse filtering, because normally a more-parameterized
path should yield fewer rows thanks to having more join clauses to apply.
In add_path, we do the full nine yards of comparing rowcount estimates
along with everything else, so that we can discard parameterized paths that
don't actually have an advantage. This fixes some issues I'd found with
add_path rejecting parameterized paths on the grounds that they were more
expensive than not-parameterized ones, even though they yielded many fewer
rows and hence would be cheaper once subsequent joining was considered.
To make the same-rowcounts assumption valid, we have to require that any
parameterized path enforce *all* join clauses that could be obtained from
the particular set of outer rels, even if not all of them are useful for
indexing. This is required at both base scans and joins. It's a good
thing anyway since the net impact is that join quals are checked at the
lowest practical level in the join tree. Hence, discard the original
rather ad-hoc mechanism for choosing parameterization joinquals, and build
a better one that has a more principled rule for when clauses can be moved.
The original rule was actually buggy anyway for lack of knowledge about
which relations are part of an outer join's outer side; getting this right
requires adding an outer_relids field to RestrictInfo.
We should be willing to cross-join two small relations if that allows us
to use an inner indexscan on a large relation (that is, the potential
indexqual for the large table requires both smaller relations). This
worked in simple cases but fell apart as soon as there was a join clause
to a fourth relation, because the existence of any two-relation join clause
caused the planner to not consider clauseless joins between other base
relations. The added regression test shows an example case adapted from
a recent complaint from Benoit Delbosc.
Adjust have_relevant_joinclause, have_relevant_eclass_joinclause, and
has_relevant_eclass_joinclause to consider that a join clause mentioning
three or more relations is sufficient grounds for joining any subset of
those relations, even if we have to do so via a cartesian join. Since such
clauses are relatively uncommon, this shouldn't affect planning speed on
typical queries; in fact it should help a bit, because the latter two
functions in particular get significantly simpler.
Although this is arguably a bug fix, I'm not going to risk back-patching
it, since it might have currently-unforeseen consequences.
In commit 57664ed25e I tried to fix a bug
reported by Teodor Sigaev by making non-simple-Var output columns distinct
(by wrapping their expressions with dummy PlaceHolderVar nodes). This did
not work too well. Commit b28ffd0fcc fixed
some ensuing problems with matching to child indexes, but per a recent
report from Claus Stadler, constraint exclusion of UNION ALL subqueries was
still broken, because constant-simplification didn't handle the injected
PlaceHolderVars well either. On reflection, the original patch was quite
misguided: there is no reason to expect that EquivalenceClass child members
will be distinct. So instead of trying to make them so, we should ensure
that we can cope with the situation when they're not.
Accordingly, this patch reverts the code changes in the above-mentioned
commits (though the regression test cases they added stay). Instead, I've
added assorted defenses to make sure that duplicate EC child members don't
cause any problems. Teodor's original problem ("MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend") is addressed more directly by
revising prepare_sort_from_pathkeys to let the parent MergeAppend's sort
list guide creation of each child's sort list.
In passing, get rid of add_sort_column; as far as I can tell, testing for
duplicate sort keys at this stage is dead code. Certainly it doesn't
trigger often enough to be worth expending cycles on in ordinary queries.
And keeping the test would've greatly complicated the new logic in
prepare_sort_from_pathkeys, because comparing pathkey list entries against
a previous output array requires that we not skip any entries in the list.
Back-patch to 9.1, like the previous patches. The only known issue in
this area that wasn't caused by the ill-advised previous patches was the
MergeAppend planning failure, which of course is not relevant before 9.1.
It's possible that we need some of the new defenses against duplicate child
EC entries in older branches, but until there's some clear evidence of that
I'm going to refrain from back-patching further.
This fixes an oversight in commit 11cad29c91,
which introduced MergeAppend plans. Before that happened, we never
particularly cared about the sort ordering of scans of inheritance child
relations, since appending their outputs together would destroy any
ordering anyway. But now it's important to be able to match child relation
sort orderings to those of the surrounding query. The original coding of
add_child_rel_equivalences skipped ec_has_const EquivalenceClasses, on the
originally-correct grounds that adding child expressions to them was
useless. The effect of this is that when a parent variable is equated to
a constant, we can't recognize that index columns on the equivalent child
variables are not sort-significant; that is, we can't recognize that a
child index on, say, (x, y) is able to generate output in "ORDER BY y"
order when there is a clause "WHERE x = constant". Adding child
expressions to the (x, constant) EquivalenceClass fixes this, without any
downside that I can see other than a few more planner cycles expended on
such queries.
Per recent gripe from Robert McGehee. Back-patch to 9.1 where MergeAppend
was introduced.
The hstore and json datatypes both have record-conversion functions that
pay attention to column names in the composite values they're handed.
We used to not worry about inserting correct field names into tuple
descriptors generated at runtime, but given these examples it seems
useful to do so. Observe the nicer-looking results in the regression
tests whose results changed.
catversion bump because there is a subtle change in requirements for stored
rule parsetrees: RowExprs from ROW() constructs now have to include field
names.
Andrew Dunstan and Tom Lane
This patch fixes the planner so that it can generate nestloop-with-
inner-indexscan plans even with one or more levels of joining between
the indexscan and the nestloop join that is supplying the parameter.
The executor was fixed to handle such cases some time ago, but the
planner was not ready. This should improve our plans in many situations
where join ordering restrictions formerly forced complete table scans.
There is probably a fair amount of tuning work yet to be done, because
of various heuristics that have been added to limit the number of
parameterized paths considered. However, we are not going to find out
what needs to be adjusted until the code gets some real-world use, so
it's time to get it in there where it can be tested easily.
Note API change for index AM amcostestimate functions. I'm not aware of
any non-core index AMs, but if there are any, they will need minor
adjustments.
A PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain another, lower-level
PlaceHolderVar. If the outer PlaceHolderVar is used, the inner one
certainly will be also, and so we have to make sure that both of them get
into the placeholder_list with correct ph_may_need values during the
initial pre-scan of the query (before deconstruct_jointree starts).
We did this correctly for PlaceHolderVars appearing in the query quals,
but overlooked the issue for those appearing in the top-level targetlist;
with the result that nested placeholders referenced only in the targetlist
did not work correctly, as illustrated in bug #6154.
While at it, add some error checking to find_placeholder_info to ensure
that we don't try to create new placeholders after it's too late to do so;
they have to all be created before deconstruct_jointree starts.
Back-patch to 8.4 where the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was introduced.
Regular aggregate functions in combination with, or within the arguments
of, window functions are OK per spec; they have the semantics that the
aggregate output rows are computed and then we run the window functions
over that row set. (Thus, this combination is not really useful unless
there's a GROUP BY so that more than one aggregate output row is possible.)
The case without GROUP BY could fail, as recently reported by Jeff Davis,
because sloppy construction of the Agg node's targetlist resulted in extra
references to possibly-ungrouped Vars appearing outside the aggregate
function calls themselves. See the added regression test case for an
example.
Fixing this requires modifying the API of flatten_tlist and its underlying
function pull_var_clause. I chose to make pull_var_clause's API for
aggregates identical to what it was already doing for placeholders, since
the useful behaviors turn out to be the same (error, report node as-is, or
recurse into it). I also tightened the error checking in this area a bit:
if it was ever valid to see an uplevel Var, Aggref, or PlaceHolderVar here,
that was a long time ago, so complain instead of ignoring them.
Backpatch into 9.1. The failure exists in 8.4 and 9.0 as well, but seeing
that it only occurs in a basically-useless corner case, it doesn't seem
worth the risks of changing a function API in a minor release. There might
be third-party code using pull_var_clause.
All expression nodes now have an explicit output-collation field, unless
they are known to only return a noncollatable data type (such as boolean
or record). Also, nodes that can invoke collation-aware functions store
a separate field that is the collation value to pass to the function.
This avoids confusion that arises when a function has collatable inputs
and noncollatable output type, or vice versa.
Also, replace the parser's on-the-fly collation assignment method with
a post-pass over the completed expression tree. This allows us to use
a more complex (and hopefully more nearly spec-compliant) assignment
rule without paying for it in extra storage in every expression node.
Fix assorted bugs in the planner's handling of collations by making
collation one of the defining properties of an EquivalenceClass and
by converting CollateExprs into discardable RelabelType nodes during
expression preprocessing.
This is advantageous first because it allows us to hash the smaller table
regardless of the outer-join type, and second because hash join can be more
flexible than merge join in dealing with arbitrary join quals in a FULL
join. For merge join all the join quals have to be mergejoinable, but hash
join will work so long as there's at least one hashjoinable qual --- the
others can be any condition. (This is true essentially because we don't
keep per-inner-tuple match flags in merge join, while hash join can do so.)
To do this, we need a has-it-been-matched flag for each tuple in the
hashtable, not just one for the current outer tuple. The key idea that
makes this practical is that we can store the match flag in the tuple's
infomask, since there are lots of bits there that are of no interest for a
MinimalTuple. So we aren't increasing the size of the hashtable at all for
the feature.
To write this without turning the hash code into even more of a pile of
spaghetti than it already was, I rewrote ExecHashJoin in a state-machine
style, similar to ExecMergeJoin. Other than that decision, it was pretty
straightforward.
The core of this patch is hash_array() and associated typcache
infrastructure, which works just about exactly like the existing support
for array comparison.
In addition I did some work to ensure that the planner won't think that an
array type is hashable unless its element type is hashable, and similarly
for sorting. This includes adding a datatype parameter to op_hashjoinable
and op_mergejoinable, and adding an explicit "hashable" flag to
SortGroupClause. The lack of a cross-check on the element type was a
pre-existing bug in mergejoin support --- but it didn't matter so much
before, because if you couldn't sort the element type there wasn't any good
alternative to failing anyhow. Now that we have the alternative of hashing
the array type, there are cases where we can avoid a failure by being picky
at the planner stage, so it's time to be picky.
The issue of exactly how to combine the per-element hash values to produce
an array hash is still open for discussion, but the rest of this is pretty
solid, so I'll commit it as-is.
Zoltan Boszormenyi exhibited a test case in which planning time was
dominated by construction of EquivalenceClasses and PathKeys that had no
actual relevance to the query (and in fact got discarded immediately).
This happened because we generated PathKeys describing the sort ordering of
every index on every table in the query, and only after that checked to see
if the sort ordering was relevant. The EC/PK construction code is O(N^2)
in the number of ECs, which is all right for the intended number of such
objects, but it gets out of hand if there are ECs for lots of irrelevant
indexes.
To fix, twiddle the handling of mergeclauses a little bit to ensure that
every interesting EC is created before we begin path generation. (This
doesn't cost anything --- in fact I think it's a bit cheaper than before
--- since we always eventually created those ECs anyway.) Then, if an
index column can't be found in any pre-existing EC, we know that that sort
ordering is irrelevant for the query. Instead of creating a useless EC,
we can just not build a pathkey for the index column in the first place.
The index will still be considered if it's useful for non-order-related
reasons, but we will think of its output as unsorted.
This patch eliminates the former need to sort the output of an Append scan
when an ordered scan of an inheritance tree is wanted. This should be
particularly useful for fast-start cases such as queries with LIMIT.
Original patch by Greg Stark, with further hacking by Hans-Jurgen Schonig,
Robert Haas, and Tom Lane.
The original coding correctly noted that these aren't just redundancies
(they're effectively X IS NOT NULL, assuming = is strict). However, they
got treated that way if X happened to be in a single-member EquivalenceClass
already, which could happen if there was an ORDER BY X clause, for instance.
The simplest and most reliable solution seems to be to not try to process
such clauses through the EquivalenceClass machinery; just throw them back
for traditional processing. The amount of work that'd be needed to be
smarter than that seems out of proportion to the benefit.
Per bug #5084 from Bernt Marius Johnsen, and analysis by Andrew Gierth.
In this case we generate two PathKey references to the expression (one for
DISTINCT and one for ORDER BY) and they really need to refer to the same
EquivalenceClass. However get_eclass_for_sort_expr was being overly paranoid
and creating two different EC's. Correct behavior is to use the SortGroupRef
index to decide whether two references to volatile expressions that are
equal() (ie textually equivalent) should be considered the same.
Backpatch to 8.4. Possibly this should be changed in 8.3 as well, but
I'll refrain in the absence of evidence of a visible failure in that branch.
Per bug #5049.
Stefan Kaltenbrunner. The most reasonable behavior (at least for the near
term) seems to be to ignore the PlaceHolderVar and examine its argument
instead. In support of this, change the API of pull_var_clause() to allow
callers to request recursion into PlaceHolderVars. Currently
estimate_num_groups() is the only customer for that behavior, but where
there's one there may be others.
keys when considering a semi or anti join. This requires estimating the
selectivity of the merge qual as though it were a regular inner join condition.
To allow caching both that and the real outer-join-aware selectivity, split
RestrictInfo.this_selec into two fields.
This fixes one of the problems reported by Kevin Grittner.
outer join clauses. Given, say,
... from a left join b on a.a1 = b.b1 where a.a1 = 42;
we'll deduce a clause b.b1 = 42 and then mark the original join clause
redundant (we can't remove it completely for reasons I don't feel like
squeezing into this log entry). However the original implementation of
that wasn't bulletproof, because clause_selectivity() wouldn't honor
this_selec if given nonzero varRelid --- which in practice meant that
it worked as desired *except* when considering index scan quals. Which
resulted in bogus underestimation of the size of the indexscan result for
an inner indexscan in an outer join, and consequently a possibly bad
choice of indexscan vs. bitmap scan. Fix by introducing an explicit test
into clause_selectivity(). Also, to make sure we don't trigger that test
in corner cases, change the convention to be that this_selec > 1, not
this_selec = 1, means it's been marked redundant. Per trouble report from
Scara Maccai.
Back-patch to 8.2, where the problem was introduced.
that represent some expression that we desire to compute below the top level
of the plan, and then let that value "bubble up" as though it were a plain
Var (ie, a column value).
The immediate application is to allow sub-selects to be flattened even when
they are below an outer join and have non-nullable output expressions.
Formerly we couldn't flatten because such an expression wouldn't properly
go to NULL when evaluated above the outer join. Now, we wrap it in a
PlaceHolderVar and arrange for the actual evaluation to occur below the outer
join. When the resulting Var bubbles up through the join, it will be set to
NULL if necessary, yielding the correct results. This fixes a planner
limitation that's existed since 7.1.
In future we might want to use this mechanism to re-introduce some form of
Hellerstein's "expensive functions" optimization, ie place the evaluation of
an expensive function at the most suitable point in the plan tree.
into nodes/nodeFuncs, so as to reduce wanton cross-subsystem #includes inside
the backend. There's probably more that should be done along this line,
but this is a start anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
which I had removed in the first cut of the EquivalenceClass rewrite to
simplify that patch a little. But it's still important --- in a four-way
join problem mergejoinscansel() was eating about 40% of the planning time
according to gprof. Also, improve the EquivalenceClass code to re-use
join RestrictInfos rather than generating fresh ones for each join
considered. This saves some memory space but more importantly improves
the effectiveness of caching planning info in RestrictInfos.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
