If we make the initially-called function return the table physical-size
estimate, acquire_inherited_sample_rows will be able to use that to
allocate numbers of samples among child tables, when the day comes that
we want to support foreign tables in inheritance trees.
ANALYZE now accepts foreign tables and allows the table's FDW to control
how the sample rows are collected. (But only manual ANALYZEs will touch
foreign tables, for the moment, since among other things it's not very
clear how to handle remote permissions checks in an auto-analyze.)
contrib/file_fdw is extended to support this.
Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, some further tweaking by me.
Further reflection shows that a single callback isn't very workable if we
desire to let FDWs generate multiple Paths, because that forces the FDW to
do all work necessary to generate a valid Plan node for each Path. Instead
split the former PlanForeignScan API into three steps: GetForeignRelSize,
GetForeignPaths, GetForeignPlan. We had already bit the bullet of breaking
the 9.1 FDW API for 9.2, so this shouldn't cause very much additional pain,
and it's substantially more flexible for complex FDWs.
Add an fdw_private field to RelOptInfo so that the new functions can save
state there rather than possibly having to recalculate information two or
three times.
In addition, we'd not thought through what would be needed to allow an FDW
to set up subexpressions of its choice for runtime execution. We could
treat ForeignScan.fdw_private as an executable expression but that seems
likely to break existing FDWs unnecessarily (in particular, it would
restrict the set of node types allowable in fdw_private to those supported
by expression_tree_walker). Instead, invent a separate field fdw_exprs
which will receive the postprocessing appropriate for expression trees.
(One field is enough since it can be a list of expressions; also, we assume
the corresponding expression state tree(s) will be held within fdw_state,
so we don't need to add anything to ForeignScanState.)
Per review of Hanada Shigeru's pgsql_fdw patch. We may need to tweak this
further as we continue to work on that patch, but to me it feels a lot
closer to being right now.
GetForeignColumnOptions provides some abstraction for accessing
column-specific FDW options, on a par with the access functions that were
already provided here for other FDW-related information.
Adjust file_fdw.c to use GetForeignColumnOptions instead of equivalent
hand-rolled code.
In addition, add some SGML documentation for the functions exported by
foreign.c that are meant for use by FDW authors.
(This is the fdw_helper portion of the proposed pgsql_fdw patch.)
Hanada Shigeru, reviewed by KaiGai Kohei
The original API specification only allowed an FDW to create a single
access path, which doesn't seem like a terribly good idea in hindsight.
Instead, move the responsibility for building the Path node and calling
add_path() into the FDW's PlanForeignScan function. Now, it can do that
more than once if appropriate. There is no longer any need for the
transient FdwPlan struct, so get rid of that.
Etsuro Fujita, Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane
As noted by Laurenz Albe, our SGML tools deal rather oddly with chapters
having just one <sect1>. Perhaps the tooling could be fixed, but really
the design of this chapter's introduction is pretty bogus anyhow. Split
it into a true introduction and a <sect1> about the FDW functions, so
that it reads better and dodges the lack-of-a-chapter-TOC problem.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas