them as arrays of the internal datatype. This requires treating the
stavalues columns as 'anyarray' rather than 'text[]', which is not 100%
kosher but seems to work fine for the purposes we need for pg_statistic.
Perhaps in the future 'anyarray' will be allowed more generally.
width types and varlena types, since with the introduction of CSTRING as
a more-or-less-real type, these concepts aren't identical. I've tried to
use varlena consistently to denote datatypes with typlen = -1, ie, they
have a length word and are potentially TOASTable; while the term variable
width covers both varlena and cstring (and, perhaps, someday other types
with other rules for computing the actual width). No code changes in this
commit except for renaming a couple macros.
default, but OIDS are removed from many system catalogs that don't need them.
Some interesting side effects: TOAST pointers are 20 bytes not 32 now;
pg_description has a three-column key instead of one.
Bugs fixed in passing: BINARY cursors work again; pg_class.relhaspkey
has some usefulness; pg_dump dumps comments on indexes, rules, and
triggers in a valid order.
initdb forced.
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.
neqsel now behave as per my suggestions in pghackers a few days ago.
selectivity for < > <= >= should work OK for integral types as well, but
still need work for nonintegral types. Since these routines have never
actually executed before :-(, this may result in some significant changes
in the optimizer's choices of execution plans. Let me know if you see
any serious misbehavior.
CAUTION: THESE CHANGES REQUIRE INITDB. pg_statistic table has changed.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Daemon
Marc G. Fournier