This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
This is SQL-standard with a few extensions, namely support for
subqueries and outer references in clause expressions.
catversion bump due to change in Aggref and WindowFunc.
David Fetter, reviewed by Dean Rasheed.
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
This commit changes index-only scans so that data is read directly from the
index tuple without first generating a faux heap tuple. The only immediate
benefit is that indexes on system columns (such as OID) can be used in
index-only scans, but this is necessary infrastructure if we are ever to
support index-only scans on expression indexes. The executor is now ready
for that, though the planner still needs substantial work to recognize
the possibility.
To do this, Vars in index-only plan nodes have to refer to index columns
not heap columns. I introduced a new special varno, INDEX_VAR, to mark
such Vars to avoid confusion. (In passing, this commit renames the two
existing special varnos to OUTER_VAR and INNER_VAR.) This allows
ruleutils.c to handle them with logic similar to what we use for subplan
reference Vars.
Since index-only scans are now fundamentally different from regular
indexscans so far as their expression subtrees are concerned, I also chose
to change them to have their own plan node type (and hence, their own
executor source file).
This provides information about the numbers of tuples that were visited
but not returned by table scans, as well as the numbers of join tuples
that were considered and discarded within a join plan node.
There is still some discussion going on about the best way to report counts
for outer-join situations, but I think most of what's in the patch would
not change if we revise that, so I'm going to go ahead and commit it as-is.
Documentation changes to follow (they weren't in the submitted patch
either).
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Marc Cousin, somewhat revised by Tom
Since collation is effectively an argument, not a property of the function,
FmgrInfo is really the wrong place for it; and this becomes critical in
cases where a cached FmgrInfo is used for varying purposes that might need
different collation settings. Fix by passing it in FunctionCallInfoData
instead. In particular this allows a clean fix for bug #5970 (record_cmp
not working). This requires touching a bit more code than the original
method, but nobody ever thought that collations would not be an invasive
patch...
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 adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
relation using the general PARAM_EXEC executor parameter mechanism, rather
than the ad-hoc kluge of passing the outer tuple down through ExecReScan.
The previous method was hard to understand and could never be extended to
handle parameters coming from multiple join levels. This patch doesn't
change the set of possible plans nor have any significant performance effect,
but it's necessary infrastructure for future generalization of the concept
of an inner indexscan plan.
ExecReScan's second parameter is now unused, so it's removed.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)
Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
being called as aggregates, and to get the aggregate transition state memory
context if needed. Use it instead of poking directly into AggState and
WindowAggState in places that shouldn't know so much.
We should have done this in 8.4, probably, but better late than never.
Revised version of a patch by Hitoshi Harada.
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function. At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.
Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally. Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
of individually pfree'ing pass-by-reference transition values. This should
be at least as fast as the prior coding, and it has the major advantage of
clearing out any working data an aggregate function may have stored in or
underneath the aggcontext. This avoids memory leakage when an aggregate
such as array_agg() is used in GROUP BY mode. Per report from Chris Spotts.
Back-patch to 8.4. In principle the problem could arise in prior versions,
but since they didn't have array_agg the issue seems not critical.
aggregated tuple of a run. Per report from Laurenz Albe. This is a new
bug in 8.4, but only because prior versions rejected SRFs in an Agg plan
node altogether.
in their targetlists had better reset ps_TupFromTlist during ReScan calls.
There's no need to back-patch here since nodeAgg and nodeGroup didn't
even pretend to support SRFs in prior releases.
In the previous coding, the list of columns that needed to be hashed on
was allocated in the per-query context, but we reallocated every time
the Agg node was rescanned. Since this information doesn't change over
a rescan, just construct the list of columns once during ExecInitAgg().
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.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
strings. This patch introduces four support functions cstring_to_text,
cstring_to_text_with_len, text_to_cstring, and text_to_cstring_buffer, and
two macros CStringGetTextDatum and TextDatumGetCString. A number of
existing macros that provided variants on these themes were removed.
Most of the places that need to make such conversions now require just one
function or macro call, in place of the multiple notational layers that used
to be needed. There are no longer any direct calls of textout or textin,
and we got most of the places that were using handmade conversions via
memcpy (there may be a few still lurking, though).
This commit doesn't make any serious effort to eliminate transient memory
leaks caused by detoasting toasted text objects before they reach
text_to_cstring. We changed PG_GETARG_TEXT_P to PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP in a few
places where it was easy, but much more could be done.
Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane
checking of argument compatibility right; although the problem is only exposed
with multiple-input aggregates in which some arguments are polymorphic and
some are not. Per bug #3852 from Sokolov Yura.
hash table is allocated in a child context of the agg node's memory
context, MemoryContextReset() will reset but *not* delete the child
context. Since ExecReScanAgg() proceeds to build a new hash table
from scratch (in a new sub-context), this results in leaking the
header for the previous memory context. Therefore, use
MemoryContextResetAndDeleteChildren() instead.
Credit: My colleague Sailesh Krishnamurthy at Truviso for isolating
the cause of the leak.
and quals have varno OUTER, rather than zero, to indicate a reference to
an output of their lefttree subplan. This is consistent with the way
that every other upper-level node type does it, and allows some simplifications
in setrefs.c and EXPLAIN.
made query plan. Use of ALTER COLUMN TYPE creates a hazard for cached
query plans: they could contain Vars that claim a column has a different
type than it now has. Fix this by checking during plan startup that Vars
at relation scan level match the current relation tuple descriptor. Since
at that point we already have at least AccessShareLock, we can be sure the
column type will not change underneath us later in the query. However,
since a backend's locks do not conflict against itself, there is still a
hole for an attacker to exploit: he could try to execute ALTER COLUMN TYPE
while a query is in progress in the current backend. Seal that hole by
rejecting ALTER TABLE whenever the target relation is already open in
the current backend.
This is a significant security hole: not only can one trivially crash the
backend, but with appropriate misuse of pass-by-reference datatypes it is
possible to read out arbitrary locations in the server process's memory,
which could allow retrieving database content the user should not be able
to see. Our thanks to Jeff Trout for the initial report.
Security: CVE-2007-0556
which comparison operators to use for plan nodes involving tuple comparison
(Agg, Group, Unique, SetOp). Formerly the executor looked up the default
equality operator for the datatype, which was really pretty shaky, since it's
possible that the data being fed to the node is sorted according to some
nondefault operator class that could have an incompatible idea of equality.
The planner knows what it has sorted by and therefore can provide the right
equality operator to use. Also, this change moves a couple of catalog lookups
out of the executor and into the planner, which should help startup time for
pre-planned queries by some small amount. Modify the planner to remove some
other cavalier assumptions about always being able to use the default
operators. Also add "nulls first/last" info to the Plan node for a mergejoin
--- neither the executor nor the planner can cope yet, but at least the API is
in place.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
the opportunity to treat COUNT(*) as a zero-argument aggregate instead
of the old hack that equated it to COUNT(1); this is materially cleaner
(no more weird ANYOID cases) and ought to be at least a tiny bit faster.
Original patch by Sergey Koposov; review, documentation, simple regression
tests, pg_dump and psql support by moi.
tuple hash table entries. This addresses the problem previously noted
that use of a 'physical tlist' in the input scan node could bloat the
hash table entries far beyond what the planner expects. It's a better
answer than my previous thought of undoing the physical tlist optimization,
because we can also remove columns that are needed to compute the aggregate
functions but aren't part of the grouping column set.
Tom Lane
Noah Misch
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway