Allow the COMMUTATOR, NEGATOR, MERGES, and HASHES attributes to be set
by ALTER OPERATOR. However, we don't allow COMMUTATOR/NEGATOR to be
changed once set, nor allow the MERGES/HASHES flags to be unset once
set. Changes like that might invalidate plans already made, and
dealing with the consequences seems like more trouble than it's worth.
The main use-case we foresee for this is to allow addition of missed
properties in extension update scripts, such as extending an existing
operator to support hashing. So only transitions from not-set to set
states seem very useful.
This patch also causes us to reject some incorrect cases that formerly
resulted in inconsistent catalog state, such as trying to set the
commutator of an operator to be some other operator that already has a
(different) commutator.
While at it, move the InvokeObjectPostCreateHook call for CREATE
OPERATOR to not occur until after we've fixed up commutator or negator
links as needed. The previous ordering could only be justified by
thinking of the OperatorUpd call as a kind of ALTER OPERATOR step;
but we don't call InvokeObjectPostAlterHook therein. It seems better
to let the hook see the final state of the operator object.
In the documentation, move the discussion of how to establish
commutator pairs from xoper.sgml to the CREATE OPERATOR ref page.
Tommy Pavlicek, reviewed and editorialized a bit by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEhP-W-vGVzf4udhR5M8Bdv88UYnPrhoSkj3ieR3QNrsGQoqdg@mail.gmail.com
This feature has been a thorn in our sides for a long time, causing
many grammatical ambiguity problems. It doesn't seem worth the
pain to continue to support it, so remove it.
There are some follow-on improvements we can make in the grammar,
but this commit only removes the bare minimum number of productions,
plus assorted backend support code.
Note that pg_dump and psql continue to have full support, since
they may be used against older servers. However, pg_dump warns
about postfix operators. There is also a check in pg_upgrade.
Documentation-wise, I (tgl) largely removed the "left unary"
terminology in favor of saying "prefix operator", which is
a more standard and IMO less confusing term.
I included a catversion bump, although no initial catalog data
changes here, to mark the boundary at which oprkind = 'r'
stopped being valid in pg_operator.
Mark Dilger, based on work by myself and Robert Haas;
review by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/38ca86db-42ab-9b48-2902-337a0d6b8311@2ndquadrant.com
Quite a few matching operators such as JSONB's @> used "contsel" and
"contjoinsel" as their selectivity estimators. That was a bad idea,
because (a) contsel is only a stub, yielding a fixed default estimate,
and (b) that default is 0.001, meaning we estimate these operators as
five times more selective than equality, which is surely pretty silly.
There's a good model for improving this in ltree's ltreeparentsel():
for any "var OP constant" query, we can try applying the operator
to all of the column's MCV and histogram values, taking the latter
as being a random sample of the non-MCV values. That code is
actually 100% generic, except for the question of exactly what
default selectivity ought to be plugged in when we don't have stats.
Hence, migrate the guts of ltreeparentsel() into the core code, provide
wrappers "matchingsel" and "matchingjoinsel" with a more-appropriate
default estimate, and use those for the non-geometric operators that
formerly used contsel (mostly JSONB containment operators and tsquery
matching).
Also apply this code to some match-like operators in hstore, ltree, and
pg_trgm, including the former users of ltreeparentsel as well as ones
that improperly used contsel. Since commit 911e70207 just created new
versions of those extensions that we haven't released yet, we can sneak
this change into those new versions instead of having to create an
additional generation of update scripts.
Patch by me, reviewed by Alexey Bashtanov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/12237.1582833074@sss.pgh.pa.us
Rename/repurpose pg_proc.protransform as "prosupport". The idea is
still that it names an internal function that provides knowledge to
the planner about the behavior of the function it's attached to;
but redesign the API specification so that it's not limited to doing
just one thing, but can support an extensible set of requests.
The original purpose of simplifying a function call is handled by
the first request type to be invented, SupportRequestSimplify.
Adjust all the existing transform functions to handle this API,
and rename them fron "xxx_transform" to "xxx_support" to reflect
the potential generalization of what they do. (Since we never
previously provided any way for extensions to add transform functions,
this change doesn't create an API break for them.)
Also add DDL and pg_dump support for attaching a support function to a
user-defined function. Unfortunately, DDL access has to be restricted
to superusers, at least for now; but seeing that support functions
will pretty much have to be written in C, that limitation is just
theoretical. (This support is untested in this patch, but a follow-on
patch will add cases that exercise it.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15193.1548028093@sss.pgh.pa.us
Since procedures are now a different thing from functions, change the
CREATE OPERATOR syntax to use FUNCTION in the clause that specifies the
function. PROCEDURE is still accepted for compatibility.
Reported-by: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Reviewed-by: Jonathan S. Katz <jonathan.katz@excoventures.com>
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name. Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.
Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
Historically, the selectivity functions have simply not distinguished
< from <=, or > from >=, arguing that the fraction of the population that
satisfies the "=" aspect can be considered to be vanishingly small, if the
comparison value isn't any of the most-common-values for the variable.
(If it is, the code path that executes the operator against each MCV will
take care of things properly.) But that isn't really true unless we're
dealing with a continuum of variable values, and in practice we seldom are.
If "x = const" would estimate a nonzero number of rows for a given const
value, then it follows that we ought to estimate different numbers of rows
for "x < const" and "x <= const", even if the const is not one of the MCVs.
Handling this more honestly makes a significant difference in edge cases,
such as the estimate for a tight range (x BETWEEN y AND z where y and z
are close together).
Hence, split scalarltsel into scalarltsel/scalarlesel, and similarly
split scalargtsel into scalargtsel/scalargesel. Adjust <= and >=
operator definitions to reference the new selectivity functions.
Improve the core ineq_histogram_selectivity() function to make a
correction for equality. (Along the way, I learned quite a bit about
exactly why that function gives good answers, which I tried to memorialize
in improved comments.)
The corresponding join selectivity functions were, and remain, just stubs.
But I chose to split them similarly, to avoid confusion and to prevent the
need for doing this exercise again if someone ever makes them less stubby.
In passing, change ineq_histogram_selectivity's clamp for extreme
probability estimates so that it varies depending on the histogram
size, instead of being hardwired at 0.0001. With the default histogram
size of 100 entries, you still get the old clamp value, but bigger
histograms should allow us to put more faith in edge values.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Aleksander Alekseev and Kuntal Ghosh
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/12232.1499140410@sss.pgh.pa.us
Errors detected using Topy (https://github.com/intgr/topy), all
changes verified by hand and some manual tweaks added.
Marti Raudsepp
Individual changes backpatched, where applicable, as far as 9.0.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
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.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
specific hash functions used by hash indexes, rather than the old
not-datatype-aware ComputeHashFunc routine. This makes it safe to do
hash joining on several datatypes that previously couldn't use hashing.
The sets of datatypes that are hash indexable and hash joinable are now
exactly the same, whereas before each had some that weren't in the other.
chapters on extending types, operators, and aggregates into the extending
functions chapter. Move the information on how to call table functions
into the queries chapter. Remove some outdated information that is
already present in a better form in other parts of the documentation.
containing a volatile function), rather than only on 'Var = Var' clauses
as before. This makes it practical to do flatten_join_alias_vars at the
start of planning, which in turn eliminates a bunch of klugery inside the
planner to deal with alias vars. As a free side effect, we now detect
implied equality of non-Var expressions; for example in
SELECT ... WHERE a.x = b.y and b.y = 42
we will deduce a.x = 42 and use that as a restriction qual on a. Also,
we can remove the restriction introduced 12/5/02 to prevent pullup of
subqueries whose targetlists contain sublinks.
Still TODO: make statistical estimation routines in selfuncs.c and costsize.c
smarter about expressions that are more complex than plain Vars. The need
for this is considerably greater now that we have to be able to estimate
the suitability of merge and hash join techniques on such expressions.
required if a datatype is to be accepted by GROUP BY, DISTINCT, or
ORDER BY. This is documentation for code changes made pursuant to
pgsql-hackers discussion around 29-Nov-02.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
(LIKE and regexp matches). These are not yet referenced in pg_operator,
so by default the system will continue to use eqsel/neqsel.
Also, tweak convert_to_scalar() logic so that common prefixes of strings
are stripped off, allowing better accuracy when all strings in a table
share a common prefix.
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Peter Eisentraut
Kevin Grittner
Bruce Momjian
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart