Commit Graph

32 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Peter Eisentraut 012460ee93 Make stxstattarget nullable
To match attstattarget change (commit 4f622503d6).  The logic inside
CreateStatistics() is clarified a bit compared to that previous patch,
and so here we also update ATExecSetStatistics() to match.

Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/4da8d211-d54d-44b9-9847-f2a9f1184c76@eisentraut.org
2024-03-17 12:26:26 +01:00
Peter Eisentraut 9b1a6f50b9 Generate syscache info from catalog files
Add a new genbki macros MAKE_SYSCACHE that specifies the syscache ID
macro, the underlying index, and the number of buckets.  From that, we
can generate the existing tables in syscache.h and syscache.c via
genbki.pl.

Reviewed-by: John Naylor <johncnaylorls@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/75ae5875-3abc-dafc-8aec-73247ed41cde@eisentraut.org
2024-01-23 07:31:06 +01:00
Bruce Momjian 29275b1d17 Update copyright for 2024
Reported-by: Michael Paquier

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ZZKTDPxBBMt3C0J9@paquier.xyz

Backpatch-through: 12
2024-01-03 20:49:05 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 226d0a6b98 Restructure DECLARE_INDEX arguments
Separate the table name from the index declaration.  We need that
anyway later for the ALTER TABLE / USING INDEX commands, so we might
as well structure the declarations like that to begin with.

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/75ae5875-3abc-dafc-8aec-73247ed41cde@eisentraut.org
2023-08-31 08:14:57 +02:00
Peter Eisentraut 3ee2f25d21 Change type of pg_statistic_ext.stxstattarget
Change from int32 to int16, to match attstattarget (changed in
90189eefc1).

Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/d6069765-5971-04d3-c10d-e4f7b2e9c459%40eisentraut.org
2023-07-03 07:18:57 +02:00
Bruce Momjian c8e1ba736b Update copyright for 2023
Backpatch-through: 11
2023-01-02 15:00:37 -05:00
Bruce Momjian 27b77ecf9f Update copyright for 2022
Backpatch-through: 10
2022-01-07 19:04:57 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 6a6389a08b Add index OID macro argument to DECLARE_INDEX
Instead of defining symbols such as AmOidIndexId explicitly, include
them as an argument of DECLARE_INDEX() and have genbki.pl generate the
way as the table OID symbols from the CATALOG() declaration.

Reviewed-by: John Naylor <john.naylor@enterprisedb.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/ccef1e46-a404-25b1-9b4c-85f2c08e1f28%40enterprisedb.com
2021-06-29 08:08:40 +02:00
Tomas Vondra a4d75c86bf Extended statistics on expressions
Allow defining extended statistics on expressions, not just just on
simple column references.  With this commit, expressions are supported
by all existing extended statistics kinds, improving the same types of
estimates. A simple example may look like this:

  CREATE TABLE t (a int);
  CREATE STATISTICS s ON mod(a,10), mod(a,20) FROM t;
  ANALYZE t;

The collected statistics are useful e.g. to estimate queries with those
expressions in WHERE or GROUP BY clauses:

  SELECT * FROM t WHERE mod(a,10) = 0 AND mod(a,20) = 0;

  SELECT 1 FROM t GROUP BY mod(a,10), mod(a,20);

This introduces new internal statistics kind 'e' (expressions) which is
built automatically when the statistics object definition includes any
expressions. This represents single-expression statistics, as if there
was an expression index (but without the index maintenance overhead).
The statistics is stored in pg_statistics_ext_data as an array of
composite types, which is possible thanks to 79f6a942bd.

CREATE STATISTICS allows building statistics on a single expression, in
which case in which case it's not possible to specify statistics kinds.

A new system view pg_stats_ext_exprs can be used to display expression
statistics, similarly to pg_stats and pg_stats_ext views.

ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... TYPE now treats indexes the same way it
treats indexes, i.e. it drops and recreates the statistics. This means
all statistics are reset, and we no longer try to preserve at least the
functional dependencies. This should not be a major issue in practice,
as the functional dependencies actually rely on per-column statistics,
which were always reset anyway.

Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby, Dean Rasheed, Zhihong Yu
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ad7891d2-e90c-b446-9fe2-7419143847d7%40enterprisedb.com
2021-03-27 00:01:11 +01:00
Tom Lane 62f34097c8 Build in some knowledge about foreign-key relationships in the catalogs.
This follows in the spirit of commit dfb75e478, which created primary
key and uniqueness constraints to improve the visibility of constraints
imposed on the system catalogs.  While our catalogs contain many
foreign-key-like relationships, they don't quite follow SQL semantics,
in that the convention for an omitted reference is to write zero not
NULL.  Plus, we have some cases in which there are arrays each of whose
elements is supposed to be an FK reference; SQL has no way to model that.
So we can't create actual foreign key constraints to describe the
situation.  Nonetheless, we can collect and use knowledge about these
relationships.

This patch therefore adds annotations to the catalog header files to
declare foreign-key relationships.  (The BKI_LOOKUP annotations cover
simple cases, but we weren't previously distinguishing which such
columns are allowed to contain zeroes; we also need new markings for
multi-column FK references.)  Then, Catalog.pm and genbki.pl are
taught to collect this information into a table in a new generated
header "system_fk_info.h".  The only user of that at the moment is
a new SQL function pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys(), which exposes the
table to SQL.  The oidjoins regression test is rewritten to use
pg_get_catalog_foreign_keys() to find out which columns to check.
Aside from removing the need for manual maintenance of that test
script, this allows it to cover numerous relationships that were not
checked by the old implementation based on findoidjoins.  (As of this
commit, 217 relationships are checked by the test, versus 181 before.)

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3240355.1612129197@sss.pgh.pa.us
2021-02-02 17:11:55 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut dfb75e478c Add primary keys and unique constraints to system catalogs
For those system catalogs that have a unique indexes, make a primary
key and unique constraint, using ALTER TABLE ... PRIMARY KEY/UNIQUE
USING INDEX.

This can be helpful for GUI tools that look for a primary key, and it
might in the future allow declaring foreign keys, for making schema
diagrams.

The constraint creation statements are automatically created by
genbki.pl from DECLARE_UNIQUE_INDEX directives.  To specify which one
of the available unique indexes is the primary key, use the new
directive DECLARE_UNIQUE_INDEX_PKEY instead.  By convention, we
usually make a catalog's OID column its primary key, if it has one.

Reviewed-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/dc5f44d9-5ec1-a596-0251-dadadcdede98@2ndquadrant.com
2021-01-30 19:44:29 +01:00
Bruce Momjian ca3b37487b Update copyright for 2021
Backpatch-through: 9.5
2021-01-02 13:06:25 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut bdc4edbea6 Move catalog index declarations
Move the system catalog index declarations from catalog/indexing.h to
the respective parent tables' catalog/pg_*.h files.  The original
reason for having it split was that the old genbki system produced the
output in the order of the catalog files it read, so all the indexing
stuff needed to come separately.  But this is no longer the case, and
keeping it together makes more sense.

Reviewed-by: John Naylor <john.naylor@enterprisedb.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c7cc82d6-f976-75d6-2e3e-b03d2cab26bb@2ndquadrant.com
2020-11-07 12:26:24 +01:00
Peter Eisentraut b4c9695e79 Move catalog toast table declarations
Move the system catalog toast table declarations from
catalog/toasting.h to the respective parent tables' catalog/pg_*.h
files.  The original reason for having it split was that the old
genbki system produced the output in the order of the catalog files it
read, so all the toasting stuff needed to come separately.  But this
is no longer the case, and keeping it together makes more sense.

Reviewed-by: John Naylor <john.naylor@enterprisedb.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c7cc82d6-f976-75d6-2e3e-b03d2cab26bb@2ndquadrant.com
2020-11-07 12:26:24 +01:00
Tom Lane fc032bed2f Be more careful about marking catalog columns NOT NULL by default.
The bug fixed in commit 72eab84a5 would not have occurred if initdb
had a less surprising rule about which columns should be marked
NOT NULL by default.  Let's make that rule be strictly that the
column must be fixed-width and its predecessors must be fixed-width
and NOT NULL, removing the hacky and unsafe exceptions for oidvector
and int2vector.

Since we do still want all existing oidvector and int2vector columns
to be marked NOT NULL, we have to put BKI_FORCE_NOT_NULL labels on
them.  But making this less magic and more documented seems like a
good idea, even if it's a shade more verbose.

I didn't bump catversion since the initial catalog contents are
not actually changed by this patch.  Note however that the
contents of postgres.bki do change, and feeding an old copy of
that to a new backend will produce wrong results.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/204760.1595181800@sss.pgh.pa.us
2020-07-21 13:03:48 -04:00
Tom Lane 5cbfce562f Initial pgindent and pgperltidy run for v13.
Includes some manual cleanup of places that pgindent messed up,
most of which weren't per project style anyway.

Notably, it seems some people didn't absorb the style rules of
commit c9d297751, because there were a bunch of new occurrences
of function calls with a newline just after the left paren, all
with faulty expectations about how the rest of the call would get
indented.
2020-05-14 13:06:50 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 7559d8ebfa Update copyrights for 2020
Backpatch-through: update all files in master, backpatch legal files through 9.4
2020-01-01 12:21:45 -05:00
Tomas Vondra d06215d03b Allow setting statistics target for extended statistics
When building statistics, we need to decide how many rows to sample and
how accurate the resulting statistics should be. Until now, it was not
possible to explicitly define statistics target for extended statistics
objects, the value was always computed from the per-attribute targets
with a fallback to the system-wide default statistics target.

That's a bit inconvenient, as it ties together the statistics target set
for per-column and extended statistics. In some cases it may be useful
to require larger sample / higher accuracy for extended statics (or the
other way around), but with this approach that's not possible.

So this commit introduces a new command, allowing to specify statistics
target for individual extended statistics objects, overriding the value
derived from per-attribute targets (and the system default).

  ALTER STATISTICS stat_name SET STATISTICS target_value;

When determining statistics target for an extended statistics object we
first look at this explicitly set value. When this value is -1, we fall
back to the old formula, looking at the per-attribute targets first and
then the system default. This means the behavior is backwards compatible
with older PostgreSQL releases.

Author: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190618213357.vli3i23vpkset2xd@development
Reviewed-by: Kirk Jamison, Dean Rasheed
2019-09-11 00:25:51 +02:00
Tomas Vondra 6cbfb784c3 Rework the pg_statistic_ext catalog
Since extended statistic got introduced in PostgreSQL 10, there was a
single catalog pg_statistic_ext storing both the definitions and built
statistic.  That's however problematic when a user is supposed to have
access only to the definitions, but not to user data.

Consider for example pg_dump on a database with RLS enabled - if the
pg_statistic_ext catalog respects RLS (which it should, if it contains
user data), pg_dump would not see any records and the result would not
define any extended statistics.  That would be a surprising behavior.

Until now this was not a pressing issue, because the existing types of
extended statistic (functional dependencies and ndistinct coefficients)
do not include any user data directly.  This changed with introduction
of MCV lists, which do include most common combinations of values.

The easiest way to fix this is to split the pg_statistic_ext catalog
into two - one for definitions, one for the built statistic values.
The new catalog is called pg_statistic_ext_data, and we're maintaining
a 1:1 relationship with the old catalog - either there are matching
records in both catalogs, or neither of them.

Bumped CATVERSION due to changing system catalog definitions.

Author: Dean Rasheed, with improvements by me
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEZATCUhT9rt7Ui%3DVdx4N%3D%3DVV5XOK5dsXfnGgVOz_JhAicB%3DZA%40mail.gmail.com
2019-06-16 01:20:31 +02:00
Tomas Vondra 7300a69950 Add support for multivariate MCV lists
Introduce a third extended statistic type, supported by the CREATE
STATISTICS command - MCV lists, a generalization of the statistic
already built and used for individual columns.

Compared to the already supported types (n-distinct coefficients and
functional dependencies), MCV lists are more complex, include column
values and allow estimation of much wider range of common clauses
(equality and inequality conditions, IS NULL, IS NOT NULL etc.).
Similarly to the other types, a new pseudo-type (pg_mcv_list) is used.

Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, David Rowley, Mark Dilger, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/dfdac334-9cf2-2597-fb27-f0fb3753f435@2ndquadrant.com
2019-03-27 18:32:18 +01:00
Bruce Momjian 97c39498e5 Update copyright for 2019
Backpatch-through: certain files through 9.4
2019-01-02 12:44:25 -05:00
Andres Freund 578b229718 Remove WITH OIDS support, change oid catalog column visibility.
Previously tables declared WITH OIDS, including a significant fraction
of the catalog tables, stored the oid column not as a normal column,
but as part of the tuple header.

This special column was not shown by default, which was somewhat odd,
as it's often (consider e.g. pg_class.oid) one of the more important
parts of a row.  Neither pg_dump nor COPY included the contents of the
oid column by default.

The fact that the oid column was not an ordinary column necessitated a
significant amount of special case code to support oid columns. That
already was painful for the existing, but upcoming work aiming to make
table storage pluggable, would have required expanding and duplicating
that "specialness" significantly.

WITH OIDS has been deprecated since 2005 (commit ff02d0a05280e0).
Remove it.

Removing includes:
- CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE syntax for declaring the table to be
  WITH OIDS has been removed (WITH (oids[ = true]) will error out)
- pg_dump does not support dumping tables declared WITH OIDS and will
  issue a warning when dumping one (and ignore the oid column).
- restoring an pg_dump archive with pg_restore will warn when
  restoring a table with oid contents (and ignore the oid column)
- COPY will refuse to load binary dump that includes oids.
- pg_upgrade will error out when encountering tables declared WITH
  OIDS, they have to be altered to remove the oid column first.
- Functionality to access the oid of the last inserted row (like
  plpgsql's RESULT_OID, spi's SPI_lastoid, ...) has been removed.

The syntax for declaring a table WITHOUT OIDS (or WITH (oids = false)
for CREATE TABLE) is still supported. While that requires a bit of
support code, it seems unnecessary to break applications / dumps that
do not use oids, and are explicit about not using them.

The biggest user of WITH OID columns was postgres' catalog. This
commit changes all 'magic' oid columns to be columns that are normally
declared and stored. To reduce unnecessary query breakage all the
newly added columns are still named 'oid', even if a table's column
naming scheme would indicate 'reloid' or such.  This obviously
requires adapting a lot code, mostly replacing oid access via
HeapTupleGetOid() with access to the underlying Form_pg_*->oid column.

The bootstrap process now assigns oids for all oid columns in
genbki.pl that do not have an explicit value (starting at the largest
oid previously used), only oids assigned later by oids will be above
FirstBootstrapObjectId. As the oid column now is a normal column the
special bootstrap syntax for oids has been removed.

Oids are not automatically assigned during insertion anymore, all
backend code explicitly assigns oids with GetNewOidWithIndex(). For
the rare case that insertions into the catalog via SQL are called for
the new pg_nextoid() function can be used (which only works on catalog
tables).

The fact that oid columns on system tables are now normal columns
means that they will be included in the set of columns expanded
by * (i.e. SELECT * FROM pg_class will now include the table's oid,
previously it did not). It'd not technically be hard to hide oid
column by default, but that'd mean confusing behavior would either
have to be carried forward forever, or it'd cause breakage down the
line.

While it's not unlikely that further adjustments are needed, the
scope/invasiveness of the patch makes it worthwhile to get merge this
now. It's painful to maintain externally, too complicated to commit
after the code code freeze, and a dependency of a number of other
patches.

Catversion bump, for obvious reasons.

Author: Andres Freund, with contributions by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180930034810.ywp2c7awz7opzcfr@alap3.anarazel.de
2018-11-20 16:00:17 -08:00
Tom Lane 68c23cba34 Improve consistency of comments in system catalog headers.
Use the term "system catalog" rather than "system relation" in assorted
places where it's clearly referring to a table rather than, say, an
index.  Use more natural word order in the header boilerplate, improve
some of the one-liner catalog descriptions, and fix assorted random
deviations from the normal boilerplate.  All purely neatnik-ism, but
why not.

John Naylor, some additional cleanup by me

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJVSVGUeJmFB3h-NJ18P32NPa+kzC165nm7GSoGHfPaN80Wxcw@mail.gmail.com
2018-04-19 17:14:09 -04:00
Tom Lane 372728b0d4 Replace our traditional initial-catalog-data format with a better design.
Historically, the initial catalog data to be installed during bootstrap
has been written in DATA() lines in the catalog header files.  This had
lots of disadvantages: the format was badly underdocumented, it was
very difficult to edit the data in any mechanized way, and due to the
lack of any abstraction the data was verbose, hard to read/understand,
and easy to get wrong.

Hence, move this data into separate ".dat" files and represent it in a way
that can easily be read and rewritten by Perl scripts.  The new format is
essentially "key => value" for each column; while it's a bit repetitive,
explicit labeling of each value makes the data far more readable and less
error-prone.  Provide a way to abbreviate entries by omitting field values
that match a specified default value for their column.  This allows removal
of a large amount of repetitive boilerplate and also lowers the barrier to
adding new columns.

Also teach genbki.pl how to translate symbolic OID references into
numeric OIDs for more cases than just "regproc"-like pg_proc references.
It can now do that for regprocedure-like references (thus solving the
problem that regproc is ambiguous for overloaded functions), operators,
types, opfamilies, opclasses, and access methods.  Use this to turn
nearly all OID cross-references in the initial data into symbolic form.
This represents a very large step forward in readability and error
resistance of the initial catalog data.  It should also reduce the
difficulty of renumbering OID assignments in uncommitted patches.

Also, solve the longstanding problem that frontend code that would like to
use OID macros and other information from the catalog headers often had
difficulty with backend-only code in the headers.  To do this, arrange for
all generated macros, plus such other declarations as we deem fit, to be
placed in "derived" header files that are safe for frontend inclusion.
(Once clients migrate to using these pg_*_d.h headers, it will be possible
to get rid of the pg_*_fn.h headers, which only exist to quarantine code
away from clients.  That is left for follow-on patches, however.)

The now-automatically-generated macros include the Anum_xxx and Natts_xxx
constants that we used to have to update by hand when adding or removing
catalog columns.

Replace the former manual method of generating OID macros for pg_type
entries with an automatic method, ensuring that all built-in types have
OID macros.  (But note that this patch does not change the way that
OID macros for pg_proc entries are built and used.  It's not clear that
making that match the other catalogs would be worth extra code churn.)

Add SGML documentation explaining what the new data format is and how to
work with it.

Despite being a very large change in the catalog headers, there is no
catversion bump here, because postgres.bki and related output files
haven't changed at all.

John Naylor, based on ideas from various people; review and minor
additional coding by me; previous review by Alvaro Herrera

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJVSVGWO48JbbwXkJz_yBFyGYW-M9YWxnPdxJBUosDC9ou_F0Q@mail.gmail.com
2018-04-08 13:17:27 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 9d4649ca49 Update copyright for 2018
Backpatch-through: certain files through 9.3
2018-01-02 23:30:12 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 821fb8cdbf Message style fixes 2017-09-11 11:21:27 -04:00
Tom Lane c7b8998ebb Phase 2 of pgindent updates.
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.

Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code.  The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there.  BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs.  So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before.  This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.

Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.

This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
2017-06-21 15:19:25 -04:00
Bruce Momjian a6fd7b7a5f Post-PG 10 beta1 pgindent run
perltidy run not included.
2017-05-17 16:31:56 -04:00
Tom Lane f04c9a6146 Standardize terminology for pg_statistic_ext entries.
Consistently refer to such an entry as a "statistics object", not just
"statistics" or "extended statistics".  Previously we had a mismash of
terms, accompanied by utter confusion as to whether the term was
singular or plural.  That's not only grating (at least to the ear of
a native English speaker) but could be outright misleading, eg in error
messages that seemed to be referring to multiple objects where only one
could be meant.

This commit fixes the code and a lot of comments (though I may have
missed a few).  I also renamed two new SQL functions,
pg_get_statisticsextdef -> pg_get_statisticsobjdef
pg_statistic_ext_is_visible -> pg_statistics_obj_is_visible
to conform better with this terminology.

I have not touched the SGML docs other than fixing those function
names; the docs certainly need work but it seems like a separable task.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/22676.1494557205@sss.pgh.pa.us
2017-05-14 10:55:01 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera ee6922112e Rename columns in new pg_statistic_ext catalog
The new catalog reused a column prefix "sta" from pg_statistic, but this
is undesirable, so change the catalog to use prefix "stx" instead.
Also, rename the column that lists enabled statistic kinds as "stxkind"
rather than "enabled".

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f_2t5jhSN7huYRFH3w3rrHfG2QU7hiUHsu-Vdjd1rYT3w@mail.gmail.com
2017-04-17 18:34:29 -03:00
Simon Riggs 2686ee1b7c Collect and use multi-column dependency stats
Follow on patch in the multi-variate statistics patch series.

CREATE STATISTICS s1 WITH (dependencies) ON (a, b) FROM t;
ANALYZE;
will collect dependency stats on (a, b) and then use the measured
dependency in subsequent query planning.

Commit 7b504eb282 added
CREATE STATISTICS with n-distinct coefficients. These are now
specified using the mutually exclusive option WITH (ndistinct).

Author: Tomas Vondra, David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Kyotaro HORIGUCHI, Álvaro Herrera, Dean Rasheed, Robert Haas
and many other comments and contributions
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/56f40b20-c464-fad2-ff39-06b668fac47c@2ndquadrant.com
2017-04-05 18:00:42 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 7b504eb282 Implement multivariate n-distinct coefficients
Add support for explicitly declared statistic objects (CREATE
STATISTICS), allowing collection of statistics on more complex
combinations that individual table columns.  Companion commands DROP
STATISTICS and ALTER STATISTICS ... OWNER TO / SET SCHEMA / RENAME are
added too.  All this DDL has been designed so that more statistic types
can be added later on, such as multivariate most-common-values and
multivariate histograms between columns of a single table, leaving room
for permitting columns on multiple tables, too, as well as expressions.

This commit only adds support for collection of n-distinct coefficient
on user-specified sets of columns in a single table.  This is useful to
estimate number of distinct groups in GROUP BY and DISTINCT clauses;
estimation errors there can cause over-allocation of memory in hashed
aggregates, for instance, so it's a worthwhile problem to solve.  A new
special pseudo-type pg_ndistinct is used.

(num-distinct estimation was deemed sufficiently useful by itself that
this is worthwhile even if no further statistic types are added
immediately; so much so that another version of essentially the same
functionality was submitted by Kyotaro Horiguchi:
https://postgr.es/m/20150828.173334.114731693.horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp
though this commit does not use that code.)

Author: Tomas Vondra.  Some code rework by Álvaro.
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, David Rowley, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Jeff Janes,
    Ideriha Takeshi
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/543AFA15.4080608@fuzzy.cz
    https://postgr.es/m/20170320190220.ixlaueanxegqd5gr@alvherre.pgsql
2017-03-24 14:06:10 -03:00