Examination of examples provided by Mark Kirkwood and others has convinced
me that actually commit 7f3eba30c9 was quite
a few bricks shy of a load. The useful part of that patch was clamping
ndistinct for the inner side of a semi or anti join, and the reason why
that's needed is that it's the only way that restriction clauses
eliminating rows from the inner relation can affect the estimated size of
the join result. I had not clearly understood why the clamping was
appropriate, and so mis-extrapolated to conclude that we should clamp
ndistinct for the outer side too, as well as for both sides of regular
joins. These latter actions were all wrong, and are reverted with this
patch. In addition, the clamping logic is now made to affect the behavior
of both paths in eqjoinsel_semi, with or without MCV lists to compare.
When we have MCVs, we suppose that the most common values are the ones
that are most likely to survive the decimation resulting from a lower
restriction clause, so we think of the clamping as eliminating non-MCV
values, or potentially even the least-common MCVs for the inner relation.
Back-patch to 8.4, same as previous fixes in this area.
3505862a8d