This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
The speed gains primarily come from:
- non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
- simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
function calls
- sharing some state between different sub-expressions
- reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
nearly all of the previously used linked lists
- more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
constant re-checks at evaluation time
Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
- basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
statements. That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
initialization overhead is measurable.
- optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
work has already been made.
- optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
been made here too.
The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
backward-incompatible changes:
- Function permission checks are now done during expression
initialization, whereas previously they were done during
execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
different array type previously didn't perform checks.
- The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer. The behavior
around might still change.
Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
changes by Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
Like Gather, we spawn multiple workers and run the same plan in each
one; however, Gather Merge is used when each worker produces the same
output ordering and we want to preserve that output ordering while
merging together the streams of tuples from various workers. (In a
way, Gather Merge is like a hybrid of Gather and MergeAppend.)
This works out to a win if it saves us from having to perform an
expensive Sort. In cases where only a small amount of data would need
to be sorted, it may actually be faster to use a regular Gather node
and then sort the results afterward, because Gather Merge sometimes
needs to wait synchronously for tuples whereas a pure Gather generally
doesn't. But if this avoids an expensive sort then it's a win.
Rushabh Lathia, reviewed and tested by Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro,
and Neha Sharma, and reviewed and revised by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAGPqQf09oPX-cQRpBKS0Gq49Z+m6KBxgxd_p9gX8CKk_d75HoQ@mail.gmail.com
XMLTABLE is defined by the SQL/XML standard as a feature that allows
turning XML-formatted data into relational form, so that it can be used
as a <table primary> in the FROM clause of a query.
This new construct provides significant simplicity and performance
benefit for XML data processing; what in a client-side custom
implementation was reported to take 20 minutes can be executed in 400ms
using XMLTABLE. (The same functionality was said to take 10 seconds
using nested PostgreSQL XPath function calls, and 5 seconds using
XMLReader under PL/Python).
The implemented syntax deviates slightly from what the standard
requires. First, the standard indicates that the PASSING clause is
optional and that multiple XML input documents may be given to it; we
make it mandatory and accept a single document only. Second, we don't
currently support a default namespace to be specified.
This implementation relies on a new executor node based on a hardcoded
method table. (Because the grammar is fixed, there is no extensibility
in the current approach; further constructs can be implemented on top of
this such as JSON_TABLE, but they require changes to core code.)
Author: Pavel Stehule, Álvaro Herrera
Extensively reviewed by: Craig Ringer
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFj8pRAgfzMD-LoSmnMGybD0WsEznLHWap8DO79+-GTRAPR4qA@mail.gmail.com
Evaluation of set returning functions (SRFs_ in the targetlist (like SELECT
generate_series(1,5)) so far was done in the expression evaluation (i.e.
ExecEvalExpr()) and projection (i.e. ExecProject/ExecTargetList) code.
This meant that most executor nodes performing projection, and most
expression evaluation functions, had to deal with the possibility that an
evaluated expression could return a set of return values.
That's bad because it leads to repeated code in a lot of places. It also,
and that's my (Andres's) motivation, made it a lot harder to implement a
more efficient way of doing expression evaluation.
To fix this, introduce a new executor node (ProjectSet) that can evaluate
targetlists containing one or more SRFs. To avoid the complexity of the old
way of handling nested expressions returning sets (e.g. having to pass up
ExprDoneCond, and dealing with arguments to functions returning sets etc.),
those SRFs can only be at the top level of the node's targetlist. The
planner makes sure (via split_pathtarget_at_srfs()) that SRF evaluation is
only necessary in ProjectSet nodes and that SRFs are only present at the
top level of the node's targetlist. If there are nested SRFs the planner
creates multiple stacked ProjectSet nodes. The ProjectSet nodes always get
input from an underlying node.
We also discussed and prototyped evaluating targetlist SRFs using ROWS
FROM(), but that turned out to be more complicated than we'd hoped.
While moving SRF evaluation to ProjectSet would allow to retain the old
"least common multiple" behavior when multiple SRFs are present in one
targetlist (i.e. continue returning rows until all SRFs are at the end of
their input at the same time), we decided to instead only return rows till
all SRFs are exhausted, returning NULL for already exhausted ones. We
deemed the previous behavior to be too confusing, unexpected and actually
not particularly useful.
As a side effect, the previously prohibited case of multiple set returning
arguments to a function, is now allowed. Not because it's particularly
desirable, but because it ends up working and there seems to be no argument
for adding code to prohibit it.
Currently the behavior for COALESCE and CASE containing SRFs has changed,
returning multiple rows from the expression, even when the SRF containing
"arm" of the expression is not evaluated. That's because the SRFs are
evaluated in a separate ProjectSet node. As that's quite confusing, we're
likely to instead prohibit SRFs in those places. But that's still being
discussed, and the code would reside in places not touched here, so that's
a task for later.
There's a lot of, now superfluous, code dealing with set return expressions
around. But as the changes to get rid of those are verbose largely boring,
it seems better for readability to keep the cleanup as a separate commit.
Author: Tom Lane and Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160822214023.aaxz5l4igypowyri@alap3.anarazel.de
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
This code provides infrastructure for a parallel leader to start up
parallel workers to execute subtrees of the plan tree being executed
in the master. User-supplied parameters from ParamListInfo are passed
down, but PARAM_EXEC parameters are not. Various other constructs,
such as initplans, subplans, and CTEs, are also not currently shared.
Nevertheless, there's enough here to support a basic implementation of
parallel query, and we can lift some of the current restrictions as
needed.
Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
The shm_mq mechanism was built to send error (and notice) messages and
tuples between backends. However, shm_mq itself only deals in raw
bytes. Since commit 2bd9e412f9, we have
had infrastructure for one message to redirect protocol messages to a
queue and for another backend to parse them and do useful things with
them. This commit introduces a somewhat analogous facility for tuples
by adding a new type of DestReceiver, DestTupleQueue, which writes
each tuple generated by a query into a shm_mq, and a new
TupleQueueFunnel facility which reads raw tuples out of the queue and
reconstructs the HeapTuple format expected by the executor.
The TupleQueueFunnel abstraction supports reading from multiple tuple
streams at the same time, but only in round-robin fashion. Someone
could imaginably want other policies, but this should be good enough
to meet our short-term needs related to parallel query, and we can
always extend it later.
This also makes one minor addition to the shm_mq API that didn'
seem worth breaking out as a separate patch.
Extracted from Amit Kapila's parallel sequential scan patch. This
code was originally written by me, and then it was revised by Amit,
and then it was revised some more by me.
Add a TABLESAMPLE clause to SELECT statements that allows
user to specify random BERNOULLI sampling or block level
SYSTEM sampling. Implementation allows for extensible
sampling functions to be written, using a standard API.
Basic version follows SQLStandard exactly. Usable
concrete use cases for the sampling API follow in later
commits.
Petr Jelinek
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Simon Riggs
This allows extension modules to define their own methods for
scanning a relation, and get the core code to use them. It's
unclear as yet how much use this capability will find, but we
won't find out if we never commit it.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed at various times and in various levels
of detail by Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Álvaro
Herrera, and myself.
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 commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
This patch eliminates the former need to sort the output of an Append scan
when an ordered scan of an inheritance tree is wanted. This should be
particularly useful for fast-start cases such as queries with LIMIT.
Original patch by Greg Stark, with further hacking by Hans-Jurgen Schonig,
Robert Haas, and Tom Lane.
execMain.c and into a new plan node type LockRows. Like the recent change
to put table updating into a ModifyTable plan node, this increases planning
flexibility by allowing the operations to occur below the top level of the
plan tree. It's necessary in any case to restore the previous behavior of
having FOR UPDATE locking occur before ModifyTable does.
This partially refactors EvalPlanQual to allow multiple rows-under-test
to be inserted into the EPQ machinery before starting an EPQ test query.
That isn't sufficient to fix EPQ's general bogosity in the face of plans
that return multiple rows per test row, though. Since this patch is
mostly about getting some plan node infrastructure in place and not about
fixing ten-year-old bugs, I will leave EPQ improvements for another day.
Another behavioral change that we could now think about is doing FOR UPDATE
before LIMIT, but that too seems like it should be treated as a followon
patch.
They are now handled by a new plan node type called ModifyTable, which is
placed at the top of the plan tree. In itself this change doesn't do much,
except perhaps make the handling of RETURNING lists and inherited UPDATEs a
tad less klugy. But it is necessary preparation for the intended extension of
allowing RETURNING queries inside WITH.
Marko Tiikkaja
There are some unimplemented aspects: recursive queries must use UNION ALL
(should allow UNION too), and we don't have SEARCH or CYCLE clauses.
These might or might not get done for 8.4, but even without them it's a
pretty useful feature.
There are also a couple of small loose ends and definitional quibbles,
which I'll send a memo about to pgsql-hackers shortly. But let's land
the patch now so we can get on with other development.
Yoshiyuki Asaba, with lots of help from Tatsuo Ishii and Tom Lane
Along the way, allow FOR UPDATE in non-WITH-HOLD cursors; there may once
have been a reason to disallow that, but it seems to work now, and it's
really rather necessary if you want to select a row via a cursor and then
update it in a concurrent-safe fashion.
Original patch by Arul Shaji, rather heavily editorialized by Tom Lane.
(e.g. "INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ...") and elsewhere as allowed
by the spec. (e.g. similar to a FROM clause subselect). initdb required.
Joe Conway and Tom Lane.
scans, using in-memory tuple ID bitmaps as the intermediary. The planner
frontend (path creation and cost estimation) is not there yet, so none
of this code can be executed. I have tested it using some hacked planner
code that is far too ugly to see the light of day, however. Committing
now so that the bulk of the infrastructure changes go in before the tree
drifts under me.
(materialization into a tuple store) discussed on pgsql-hackers earlier.
I've updated the documentation and the regression tests.
Notes on the implementation:
- I needed to change the tuple store API slightly -- it assumes that it
won't be used to hold data across transaction boundaries, so the temp
files that it uses for on-disk storage are automatically reclaimed at
end-of-transaction. I added a flag to tuplestore_begin_heap() to control
this behavior. Is changing the tuple store API in this fashion OK?
- in order to store executor results in a tuple store, I added a new
CommandDest. This works well for the most part, with one exception: the
current DestFunction API doesn't provide enough information to allow the
Executor to store results into an arbitrary tuple store (where the
particular tuple store to use is chosen by the call site of
ExecutorRun). To workaround this, I've temporarily hacked up a solution
that works, but is not ideal: since the receiveTuple DestFunction is
passed the portal name, we can use that to lookup the Portal data
structure for the cursor and then use that to get at the tuple store the
Portal is using. This unnecessarily ties the Portal code with the
tupleReceiver code, but it works...
The proper fix for this is probably to change the DestFunction API --
Tom suggested passing the full QueryDesc to the receiveTuple function.
In that case, callers of ExecutorRun could "subclass" QueryDesc to add
any additional fields that their particular CommandDest needed to get
access to. This approach would work, but I'd like to think about it for
a little bit longer before deciding which route to go. In the mean time,
the code works fine, so I don't think a fix is urgent.
- (semi-related) I added a NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and
adjusted the behavior of SCROLL in accordance with the discussion on
-hackers.
- (unrelated) Cleaned up some SGML markup in sql.sgml, copy.sgml
Neil Conway
returns-set boolean field in Func and Oper nodes. This allows cleaner,
more reliable tests for expressions returning sets in the planner and
parser. For example, a WHERE clause returning a set is now detected
and complained of in the parser, not only at runtime.
some kibitzing from Tom Lane. Not everything works yet, and there's
no documentation or regression test, but let's commit this so Joe
doesn't need to cope with tracking changes in so many files ...
ExecutorRun. This allows LIMIT to work in a view. Also, LIMIT in a
cursor declaration will behave in a reasonable fashion, whereas before
it was overridden by the FETCH count.
SQL92 semantics, including support for ALL option. All three can be used
in subqueries and views. DISTINCT and ORDER BY work now in views, too.
This rewrite fixes many problems with cross-datatype UNIONs and INSERT/SELECT
where the SELECT yields different datatypes than the INSERT needs. I did
that by making UNION subqueries and SELECT in INSERT be treated like
subselects-in-FROM, thereby allowing an extra level of targetlist where the
datatype conversions can be inserted safely.
INITDB NEEDED!
(Don't forget that an alias is required.) Views reimplemented as expanding
to subselect-in-FROM. Grouping, aggregates, DISTINCT in views actually
work now (he says optimistically). No UNION support in subselects/views
yet, but I have some ideas about that. Rule-related permissions checking
moved out of rewriter and into executor.
INITDB REQUIRED!
Attached you'll find a (big) patch that fixes make dep and make
depend in all Makefiles where I found it to be appropriate.
It also removes the dependency in Makefile.global for NAMEDATALEN
and OIDNAMELEN by making backend/catalog/genbki.sh and bin/initdb/initdb.sh
a little smarter.
This no longer requires initdb.sh that is turned into initdb with
a sed script when installing Postgres, hence initdb.sh should be
renamed to initdb (after the patch has been applied :-) )
This patch is against the 6.3 sources, as it took a while to
complete.
Please review and apply,
Cheers,
Jeroen van Vianen
ExecReScan for nodeAgg, nodeHash, nodeHashjoin, nodeNestloop and nodeResult.
Fixed ExecReScan for nodeMaterial.
Get rid of #ifdef INDEXSCAN_PATCH.
Get rid of ExecMarkPos and ExecRestrPos in nodeNestloop.
tree "non-PORTNAME" dependent. Technically, anything that is PORTNAME
dependent should be able to be derived at compile time, through configure
or through gcc
