Commit e7cb7ee145 included some design
decisions that seem pretty questionable to me, and there was quite a lot
of stuff not to like about the documentation and comments. Clean up
as follows:
* Consider foreign joins only between foreign tables on the same server,
rather than between any two foreign tables with the same underlying FDW
handler function. In most if not all cases, the FDW would simply have had
to apply the same-server restriction itself (far more expensively, both for
lack of caching and because it would be repeated for each combination of
input sub-joins), or else risk nasty bugs. Anyone who's really intent on
doing something outside this restriction can always use the
set_join_pathlist_hook.
* Rename fdw_ps_tlist/custom_ps_tlist to fdw_scan_tlist/custom_scan_tlist
to better reflect what they're for, and allow these custom scan tlists
to be used even for base relations.
* Change make_foreignscan() API to include passing the fdw_scan_tlist
value, since the FDW is required to set that. Backwards compatibility
doesn't seem like an adequate reason to expect FDWs to set it in some
ad-hoc extra step, and anyway existing FDWs can just pass NIL.
* Change the API of path-generating subroutines of add_paths_to_joinrel,
and in particular that of GetForeignJoinPaths and set_join_pathlist_hook,
so that various less-used parameters are passed in a struct rather than
as separate parameter-list entries. The objective here is to reduce the
probability that future additions to those parameter lists will result in
source-level API breaks for users of these hooks. It's possible that this
is even a small win for the core code, since most CPU architectures can't
pass more than half a dozen parameters efficiently anyway. I kept root,
joinrel, outerrel, innerrel, and jointype as separate parameters to reduce
code churn in joinpath.c --- in particular, putting jointype into the
struct would have been problematic because of the subroutines' habit of
changing their local copies of that variable.
* Avoid ad-hocery in ExecAssignScanProjectionInfo. It was probably all
right for it to know about IndexOnlyScan, but if the list is to grow
we should refactor the knowledge out to the callers.
* Restore nodeForeignscan.c's previous use of the relcache to avoid
extra GetFdwRoutine lookups for base-relation scans.
* Lots of cleanup of documentation and missed comments. Re-order some
code additions into more logical places.
Foreign data wrappers can use this capability for so-called "join
pushdown"; that is, instead of executing two separate foreign scans
and then joining the results locally, they can generate a path which
performs the join on the remote server and then is scanned locally.
This commit does not extend postgres_fdw to take advantage of this
capability; it just provides the infrastructure.
Custom scan providers can use this in a similar way. Previously,
it was only possible for a custom scan provider to scan a single
relation. Now, it can scan an entire join tree, provided of course
that it knows how to produce the same results that the join would
have produced if executed normally.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat, and me.
As of commit a87c72915 (which later got backpatched as far as 9.1),
we're explicitly supporting the notion that append relations can be
nested; this can occur when UNION ALL constructs are nested, or when
a UNION ALL contains a table with inheritance children.
Bug #11457 from Nelson Page, as well as an earlier report from Elvis
Pranskevichus, showed that there were still nasty bugs associated with such
cases: in particular the EquivalenceClass mechanism could try to generate
"join" clauses connecting an appendrel child to some grandparent appendrel,
which would result in assertion failures or bogus plans.
Upon investigation I concluded that all current callers of
find_childrel_appendrelinfo() need to be fixed to explicitly consider
multiple levels of parent appendrels. The most complex fix was in
processing of "broken" EquivalenceClasses, which are ECs for which we have
been unable to generate all the derived equality clauses we would like to
because of missing cross-type equality operators in the underlying btree
operator family. That code path is more or less entirely untested by
the regression tests to date, because no standard opfamilies have such
holes in them. So I wrote a new regression test script to try to exercise
it a bit, which turned out to be quite a worthwhile activity as it exposed
existing bugs in all supported branches.
The present patch is essentially the same as far back as 9.2, which is
where parameterized paths were introduced. In 9.0 and 9.1, we only need
to back-patch a small fragment of commit 5b7b5518d, which fixes failure to
propagate out the original WHERE clauses when a broken EC contains constant
members. (The regression test case results show that these older branches
are noticeably stupider than 9.2+ in terms of the quality of the plans
generated; but we don't really care about plan quality in such cases,
only that the plan not be outright wrong. A more invasive fix in the
older branches would not be a good idea anyway from a plan-stability
standpoint.)
The planner largely failed to consider the possibility that a
PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain a lateral reference to a Var
coming from somewhere outside the PHV's syntactic scope. We had a previous
report of a problem in this area, which I tried to fix in a quick-hack way
in commit 4da6439bd8, but Antonin Houska
pointed out that there were still some problems, and investigation turned
up other issues. This patch largely reverts that commit in favor of a more
thoroughly thought-through solution. The new theory is that a PHV's
ph_eval_at level cannot be higher than its original syntactic level. If it
contains lateral references, those don't change the ph_eval_at level, but
rather they create a lateral-reference requirement for the ph_eval_at join
relation. The code in joinpath.c needs to handle that.
Another issue is that createplan.c wasn't handling nested PlaceHolderVars
properly.
In passing, push knowledge of lateral-reference checks for join clauses
into join_clause_is_movable_to. This is mainly so that FDWs don't need
to deal with it.
This patch doesn't fix the original join-qual-placement problem reported by
Jeremy Evans (and indeed, one of the new regression test cases shows the
wrong answer because of that). But the PlaceHolderVar problems need to be
fixed before that issue can be addressed, so committing this separately
seems reasonable.
Formerly, query_planner returned one or possibly two Paths for the topmost
join relation, so that grouping_planner didn't see the join RelOptInfo
(at least not directly; it didn't have any hesitation about examining
cheapest_path->parent, though). However, correct selection of the Paths
involved a significant amount of coupling between query_planner and
grouping_planner, a problem which has gotten worse over time. It seems
best to give up on this API choice and instead return the topmost
RelOptInfo explicitly. Then grouping_planner can pull out the Paths it
wants from the rel's path list. In this way we can remove all knowledge
of grouping behaviors from query_planner.
The only real benefit of the old way is that in the case of an empty
FROM clause, we never made any RelOptInfos at all, just a Path. Now
we have to gin up a dummy RelOptInfo to represent the empty FROM clause.
That's not a very big deal though.
While at it, simplify query_planner's API a bit more by having the caller
set up root->tuple_fraction and root->limit_tuples, rather than passing
those values as separate parameters. Since query_planner no longer does
anything with either value, requiring it to fill the PlannerInfo fields
seemed pretty arbitrary.
This patch just rearranges code; it doesn't (intentionally) change any
behaviors. Followup patches will do more interesting things.
The planner previously assumed that parameter Vars having the same absolute
query level, varno, and varattno could safely be assigned the same runtime
PARAM_EXEC slot, even though they might be different Vars appearing in
different subqueries. This was (probably) safe before the introduction of
CTEs, but the lazy-evalution mechanism used for CTEs means that a CTE can
be executed during execution of some other subquery, causing the lifespan
of Params at the same syntactic nesting level as the CTE to overlap with
use of the same slots inside the CTE. In 9.1 we created additional hazards
by using the same parameter-assignment technology for nestloop inner scan
parameters, but it was broken before that, as illustrated by the added
regression test.
To fix, restructure the planner's management of PlannerParamItems so that
items having different semantic lifespans are kept rigorously separated.
This will probably result in complex queries using more runtime PARAM_EXEC
slots than before, but the slots are cheap enough that this hardly matters.
Also, stop generating PlannerParamItems containing Params for subquery
outputs: all we really need to do is reserve the PARAM_EXEC slot number,
and that now only takes incrementing a counter. The planning code is
simpler and probably faster than before, as well as being more correct.
Per report from Vik Reykja.
These changes will mostly also need to be made in the back branches, but
I'm going to hold off on that until after 9.2.0 wraps.
We can detect whether the planner top level is going to care at all about
cheap startup cost (it will only do so if query_planner's tuple_fraction
argument is greater than zero). If it isn't, we might as well discard
paths immediately whose only advantage over others is cheap startup cost.
This turns out to get rid of quite a lot of paths in complex queries ---
I saw planner runtime reduction of more than a third on one large query.
Since add_path isn't currently passed the PlannerInfo "root", the easiest
way to tell it whether to do this was to add a bool flag to RelOptInfo.
That's a bit redundant, since all relations in a given query level will
have the same setting. But in the future it's possible that we'd refine
the control decision to work on a per-relation basis, so this seems like
a good arrangement anyway.
Per my suggestion of a few months ago.
This patch takes care of a number of problems having to do with failure
to choose valid join orders and incorrect handling of lateral references
pulled up from subqueries. Notable changes:
* Add a LateralJoinInfo data structure similar to SpecialJoinInfo, to
represent join ordering constraints created by lateral references.
(I first considered extending the SpecialJoinInfo structure, but the
semantics are different enough that a separate data structure seems
better.) Extend join_is_legal() and related functions to prevent trying
to form unworkable joins, and to ensure that we will consider joins that
satisfy lateral references even if the joins would be clauseless.
* Fill in the infrastructure needed for the last few types of relation scan
paths to support parameterization. We'd have wanted this eventually
anyway, but it is necessary now because a relation that gets pulled up out
of a UNION ALL subquery may acquire a reltargetlist containing lateral
references, meaning that its paths *have* to be parameterized whether or
not we have any code that can push join quals down into the scan.
* Compute data about lateral references early in query_planner(), and save
in RelOptInfo nodes, to avoid repetitive calculations later.
* Assorted corner-case bug fixes.
There's probably still some bugs left, but this is a lot closer to being
real than it was before.
This patch adjusts the treatment of parameterized paths so that all paths
with the same parameterization (same set of required outer rels) for the
same relation will have the same rowcount estimate. We cache the rowcount
estimates to ensure that property, and hopefully save a few cycles too.
Doing this makes it practical for add_path_precheck to operate without
a rowcount estimate: it need only assume that paths with different
parameterizations never dominate each other, which is close enough to
true anyway for coarse filtering, because normally a more-parameterized
path should yield fewer rows thanks to having more join clauses to apply.
In add_path, we do the full nine yards of comparing rowcount estimates
along with everything else, so that we can discard parameterized paths that
don't actually have an advantage. This fixes some issues I'd found with
add_path rejecting parameterized paths on the grounds that they were more
expensive than not-parameterized ones, even though they yielded many fewer
rows and hence would be cheaper once subsequent joining was considered.
To make the same-rowcounts assumption valid, we have to require that any
parameterized path enforce *all* join clauses that could be obtained from
the particular set of outer rels, even if not all of them are useful for
indexing. This is required at both base scans and joins. It's a good
thing anyway since the net impact is that join quals are checked at the
lowest practical level in the join tree. Hence, discard the original
rather ad-hoc mechanism for choosing parameterization joinquals, and build
a better one that has a more principled rule for when clauses can be moved.
The original rule was actually buggy anyway for lack of knowledge about
which relations are part of an outer join's outer side; getting this right
requires adding an outer_relids field to RestrictInfo.
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.
This patch fixes the planner so that it can generate nestloop-with-
inner-indexscan plans even with one or more levels of joining between
the indexscan and the nestloop join that is supplying the parameter.
The executor was fixed to handle such cases some time ago, but the
planner was not ready. This should improve our plans in many situations
where join ordering restrictions formerly forced complete table scans.
There is probably a fair amount of tuning work yet to be done, because
of various heuristics that have been added to limit the number of
parameterized paths considered. However, we are not going to find out
what needs to be adjusted until the code gets some real-world use, so
it's time to get it in there where it can be tested easily.
Note API change for index AM amcostestimate functions. I'm not aware of
any non-core index AMs, but if there are any, they will need minor
adjustments.
Add a column pg_class.relallvisible to remember the number of pages that
were all-visible according to the visibility map as of the last VACUUM
(or ANALYZE, or some other operations that update pg_class.relpages).
Use relallvisible/relpages, instead of an arbitrary constant, to estimate
how many heap page fetches can be avoided during an index-only scan.
This is pretty primitive and will no doubt see refinements once we've
acquired more field experience with the index-only scan mechanism, but
it's way better than using a constant.
Note: I had to adjust an underspecified query in the window.sql regression
test, because it was changing answers when the plan changed to use an
index-only scan. Some of the adjacent tests perhaps should be adjusted
as well, but I didn't do that here.
Formerly, set_subquery_pathlist and other creators of plans for subqueries
saved only the rangetable and rowMarks lists from the lower-level
PlannerInfo. But there's no reason not to remember the whole PlannerInfo,
and indeed this turns out to simplify matters in a number of places.
The immediate reason for doing this was so that the subroot will still be
accessible when we're trying to extract column statistics out of an
already-planned subquery. But now that I've done it, it seems like a good
code-beautification effort in its own right.
I also chose to get rid of the transient subrtable and subrowmark fields in
SubqueryScan nodes, in favor of having setrefs.c look up the subquery's
RelOptInfo. That required changing all the APIs in setrefs.c to pass
PlannerInfo not PlannerGlobal, which was a large but quite mechanical
transformation.
One side-effect not foreseen at the beginning is that this finally broke
inheritance_planner's assumption that replanning the same subquery RTE N
times would necessarily give interchangeable results each time. That
assumption was always pretty risky, but now we really have to make a
separate RTE for each instance so that there's a place to carry the
separate subroots.
by adding a requirement that build_join_rel add new join RelOptInfos to the
appropriate list immediately at creation. Per report from Robert Haas,
the list_concat_unique_ptr() calls that this change eliminates were taking
the lion's share of the runtime in larger join problems. This doesn't do
anything to fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join
problems, but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.
Note: because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built,
it might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
alternatives have exactly the same costs. There is one example in the
regression tests.
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.
that represent some expression that we desire to compute below the top level
of the plan, and then let that value "bubble up" as though it were a plain
Var (ie, a column value).
The immediate application is to allow sub-selects to be flattened even when
they are below an outer join and have non-nullable output expressions.
Formerly we couldn't flatten because such an expression wouldn't properly
go to NULL when evaluated above the outer join. Now, we wrap it in a
PlaceHolderVar and arrange for the actual evaluation to occur below the outer
join. When the resulting Var bubbles up through the join, it will be set to
NULL if necessary, yielding the correct results. This fixes a planner
limitation that's existed since 7.1.
In future we might want to use this mechanism to re-introduce some form of
Hellerstein's "expensive functions" optimization, ie place the evaluation of
an expensive function at the most suitable point in the plan tree.
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
the old JOIN_IN code, but antijoins are new functionality.) Teach the planner
to convert appropriate EXISTS and NOT EXISTS subqueries into semi and anti
joins respectively. Also, LEFT JOINs with suitable upper-level IS NULL
filters are recognized as being anti joins. Unify the InClauseInfo and
OuterJoinInfo infrastructure into "SpecialJoinInfo". With that change,
it becomes possible to associate a SpecialJoinInfo with every join attempt,
which permits some cleanup of join selectivity estimation. That needs to be
taken much further than this patch does, but the next step is to change the
API for oprjoin selectivity functions, which seems like material for a
separate patch. So for the moment the output size estimates for semi and
especially anti joins are quite bogus.
are mostly excluded by constraints: do the CE test a bit earlier to save
some adjust_appendrel_attrs() work on excluded children, and arrange to
use array indexing rather than rt_fetch() to fetch RTEs in the main body
of the planner. The latter is something I'd wanted to do for awhile anyway,
but seeing list_nth_cell() as 35% of the runtime gets one's attention.
useless substructure for its RangeTblEntry nodes. (I chose to keep using the
same struct node type and just zero out the link fields for unneeded info,
rather than making a separate ExecRangeTblEntry type --- it seemed too
fragile to have two different rangetable representations.)
Along the way, put subplans into a list in the toplevel PlannedStmt node,
and have SubPlan nodes refer to them by list index instead of direct pointers.
Vadim wanted to do that years ago, but I never understood what he was on about
until now. It makes things a *whole* lot more robust, because we can stop
worrying about duplicate processing of subplans during expression tree
traversals. That's been a constant source of bugs, and it's finally gone.
There are some consequent simplifications yet to be made, like not using
a separate EState for subplans in the executor, but I'll tackle that later.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
tables in the query compete for cache space, not just the one we are
currently costing an indexscan for. This seems more realistic, and it
definitely will help in examples recently exhibited by Stefan
Kaltenbrunner. To get the total size of all the tables involved, we must
tweak the handling of 'append relations' a bit --- formerly we looked up
information about the child tables on-the-fly during set_append_rel_pathlist,
but it needs to be done before we start doing any cost estimation, so
push it into the add_base_rels_to_query scan.
(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.
(table or index) before trying to open its relcache entry. This fixes
race conditions in which someone else commits a change to the relation's
catalog entries while we are in process of doing relcache load. Problems
of that ilk have been reported sporadically for years, but it was not
really practical to fix until recently --- for instance, the recent
addition of WAL-log support for in-place updates helped.
Along the way, remove pg_am.amconcurrent: all AMs are now expected to support
concurrent update.
relations: fix the executor so that we can have an Append plan on the
inside of a nestloop and still pass down outer index keys to index scans
within the Append, then generate such plans as if they were regular
inner indexscans. This avoids the need to evaluate the outer relation
multiple times.
thereby sharing code with the inheritance case. This puts the UNION-ALL-view
approach to partitioned tables on par with inheritance, so far as constraint
exclusion is concerned: it works either way. (Still need to update the docs
to say so.) The definition of "simple UNION ALL" is a little simpler than
I would like --- basically the union arms can only be SELECT * FROM foo
--- but it's good enough for partitioned-table cases.
inheritance trees on-the-fly, which pretty well constrained us to considering
only one way of planning inheritance, expand inheritance sets during the
planner prep phase, and build a side data structure that can be consulted
later to find which RTEs are members of which inheritance sets. As proof of
concept, use the data structure to plan joins against inheritance sets more
efficiently: we can now use indexes on the set members in inner-indexscan
joins. (The generated plans could be improved further, but it'll take some
executor changes.) This data structure will also support handling UNION ALL
subqueries in the same way as inheritance sets, but that aspect of it isn't
finished yet.
Per my recent proposal. I ended up basing the implementation on the
existing mechanism for enforcing valid join orders of IN joins --- the
rules for valid outer-join orders are somewhat similar.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Magnus Hagander
Joe Conway