Incremental Sort is an optimized variant of multikey sort for cases when
the input is already sorted by a prefix of the requested sort keys. For
example when the relation is already sorted by (key1, key2) and we need
to sort it by (key1, key2, key3) we can simply split the input rows into
groups having equal values in (key1, key2), and only sort/compare the
remaining column key3.
This has a number of benefits:
- Reduced memory consumption, because only a single group (determined by
values in the sorted prefix) needs to be kept in memory. This may also
eliminate the need to spill to disk.
- Lower startup cost, because Incremental Sort produce results after each
prefix group, which is beneficial for plans where startup cost matters
(like for example queries with LIMIT clause).
We consider both Sort and Incremental Sort, and decide based on costing.
The implemented algorithm operates in two different modes:
- Fetching a minimum number of tuples without check of equality on the
prefix keys, and sorting on all columns when safe.
- Fetching all tuples for a single prefix group and then sorting by
comparing only the remaining (non-prefix) keys.
We always start in the first mode, and employ a heuristic to switch into
the second mode if we believe it's beneficial - the goal is to minimize
the number of unnecessary comparions while keeping memory consumption
below work_mem.
This is a very old patch series. The idea was originally proposed by
Alexander Korotkov back in 2013, and then revived in 2017. In 2018 the
patch was taken over by James Coleman, who wrote and rewrote most of the
current code.
There were many reviewers/contributors since 2013 - I've done my best to
pick the most active ones, and listed them in this commit message.
Author: James Coleman, Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra, Andreas Karlsson, Marti Raudsepp, Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas, Thomas Munro, Antonin Houska, Andres Freund, Alexander Kuzmenkov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdscOX5an71nHd8WSUH6GNOCf=V7wgDaTXdDd9=goN-gfA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
This follows multiple complains from Peter Geoghegan, Andres Freund and
Alvaro Herrera that this issue ought to be dug more before actually
happening, if it happens.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191226144606.GA5659@alvherre.pgsql
The following renaming is done so as source files related to index
access methods are more consistent with table access methods (the
original names used for index AMs ware too generic, and could be
confused as including features related to table AMs):
- amapi.h -> indexam.h.
- amapi.c -> indexamapi.c. Here we have an equivalent with
backend/access/table/tableamapi.c.
- amvalidate.c -> indexamvalidate.c.
- amvalidate.h -> indexamvalidate.h.
- genam.c -> indexgenam.c.
- genam.h -> indexgenam.h.
This has been discussed during the development of v12 when table AM was
worked on, but the renaming never happened.
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-by: Fabien Coelho, Julien Rouhaud
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191223053434.GF34339@paquier.xyz
If there's only one child relation, the Append or MergeAppend isn't
doing anything useful, and can be elided. It does have a purpose
during planning though, which is to serve as a buffer between parent
and child Var numbering. Therefore we keep it all the way through
to setrefs.c, and get rid of it only after fixing references in the
plan level(s) above it. This works largely the same as setrefs.c's
ancient hack to get rid of no-op SubqueryScan nodes, and can even
share some code with that.
Note the change to make setrefs.c use apply_tlist_labeling rather than
ad-hoc code. This has the effect of propagating the child's resjunk
and ressortgroupref labels, which formerly weren't propagated when
removing a SubqueryScan. Doing that is demonstrably necessary for
the [Merge]Append cases, and seems harmless for SubqueryScan, if only
because trivial_subqueryscan is afraid to collapse cases where the
resjunk marking differs. (I suspect that restriction could now be
removed, though it's unclear that it'd make any new matches possible,
since the outer query can't have references to a child resjunk column.)
David Rowley, reviewed by Alvaro Herrera and Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f_7u8ATyJ1JGTMHFoKDvZdeF-iEBhs+sM_SXowOr9cArg@mail.gmail.com
The old name of this file was never a very good indication of what it
was for. Now that there's also access/relation.h, we have a potential
confusion hazard as well, so let's rename it to something more apropos.
Per discussion, "pathnodes.h" is reasonable, since a good fraction of
the file is Path node definitions.
While at it, tweak a couple of other headers that were gratuitously
importing relation.h into modules that don't need it.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/7719.1548688728@sss.pgh.pa.us
The fact that "SELECT expression" has no base relations has long been a
thorn in the side of the planner. It makes it hard to flatten a sub-query
that looks like that, or is a trivial VALUES() item, because the planner
generally uses relid sets to identify sub-relations, and such a sub-query
would have an empty relid set if we flattened it. prepjointree.c contains
some baroque logic that works around this in certain special cases --- but
there is a much better answer. We can replace an empty FROM clause with a
dummy RTE that acts like a table of one row and no columns, and then there
are no such corner cases to worry about. Instead we need some logic to
get rid of useless dummy RTEs, but that's simpler and covers more cases
than what was there before.
For really trivial cases, where the query is just "SELECT expression" and
nothing else, there's a hazard that adding the extra RTE makes for a
noticeable slowdown; even though it's not much processing, there's not
that much for the planner to do overall. However testing says that the
penalty is very small, close to the noise level. In more complex queries,
this is able to find optimizations that we could not find before.
The new RTE type is called RTE_RESULT, since the "scan" plan type it
gives rise to is a Result node (the same plan we produced for a "SELECT
expression" query before). To avoid confusion, rename the old ResultPath
path type to GroupResultPath, reflecting that it's only used in degenerate
grouping cases where we know the query produces just one grouped row.
(It wouldn't work to unify the two cases, because there are different
rules about where the associated quals live during query_planner.)
Note: although this touches readfuncs.c, I don't think a catversion
bump is required, because the added case can't occur in stored rules,
only plans.
Patch by me, reviewed by David Rowley and Mark Dilger
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15944.1521127664@sss.pgh.pa.us
A QueryEnvironment concept is added, which allows new types of
objects to be passed into queries from parsing on through
execution. At this point, the only thing implemented is a
collection of EphemeralNamedRelation objects -- relations which
can be referenced by name in queries, but do not exist in the
catalogs. The only type of ENR implemented is NamedTuplestore, but
provision is made to add more types fairly easily.
An ENR can carry its own TupleDesc or reference a relation in the
catalogs by relid.
Although these features can be used without SPI, convenience
functions are added to SPI so that ENRs can easily be used by code
run through SPI.
The initial use of all this is going to be transition tables in
AFTER triggers, but that will be added to each PL as a separate
commit.
An incidental effect of this patch is to produce a more informative
error message if an attempt is made to modify the contents of a CTE
from a referencing DML statement. No tests previously covered that
possibility, so one is added.
Kevin Grittner and Thomas Munro
Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas, David Fetter, and Thomas Munro
with valuable comments and suggestions from many others
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
Since 69f4b9c plain expression evaluation (and thus normal projection)
can't return sets of tuples anymore. Thus remove code dealing with
that possibility.
This will require adjustments in external code using
ExecEvalExpr()/ExecProject() - that should neither be hard nor very
common.
Author: Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160822214023.aaxz5l4igypowyri@alap3.anarazel.de
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
Per discussion, we should provide such functions to replace the lost
ability to discover AM properties by inspecting pg_am (cf commit
65c5fcd35). The added functionality is also meant to displace any code
that was looking directly at pg_index.indoption, since we'd rather not
believe that the bit meanings in that field are part of any client API
contract.
As future-proofing, define the SQL API to not assume that properties that
are currently AM-wide or index-wide will remain so unless they logically
must be; instead, expose them only when inquiring about a specific index
or even specific index column. Also provide the ability for an index
AM to override the behavior.
In passing, document pg_am.amtype, overlooked in commit 473b93287.
Andrew Gierth, with kibitzing by me and others
Discussion: <87mvl5on7n.fsf@news-spur.riddles.org.uk>
I've been saying we needed to do this for more than five years, and here it
finally is. This patch removes the ever-growing tangle of spaghetti logic
that grouping_planner() used to use to try to identify the best plan for
post-scan/join query steps. Now, there is (nearly) independent
consideration of each execution step, and entirely separate construction of
Paths to represent each of the possible ways to do that step. We choose
the best Path or set of Paths using the same add_path() logic that's been
used inside query_planner() for years.
In addition, this patch removes the old restriction that subquery_planner()
could return only a single Plan. It now returns a RelOptInfo containing a
set of Paths, just as query_planner() does, and the parent query level can
use each of those Paths as the basis of a SubqueryScanPath at its level.
This allows finding some optimizations that we missed before, wherein a
subquery was capable of returning presorted data and thereby avoiding a
sort in the parent level, making the overall cost cheaper even though
delivering sorted output was not the cheapest plan for the subquery in
isolation. (A couple of regression test outputs change in consequence of
that. However, there is very little change in visible planner behavior
overall, because the point of this patch is not to get immediate planning
benefits but to create the infrastructure for future improvements.)
There is a great deal left to do here. This patch unblocks a lot of
planner work that was basically impractical in the old code structure,
such as allowing FDWs to implement remote aggregation, or rewriting
plan_set_operations() to allow consideration of multiple implementation
orders for set operations. (The latter will likely require a full
rewrite of plan_set_operations(); what I've done here is only to fix it
to return Paths not Plans.) I have also left unfinished some localized
refactoring in createplan.c and planner.c, because it was not necessary
to get this patch to a working state.
Thanks to Robert Haas, David Rowley, and Amit Kapila for review.
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
In addition, this path fills in a number of missing bits and pieces in
the parallel infrastructure. Paths and plans now have a parallel_aware
flag indicating whether whatever parallel-aware logic they have should
be engaged. It is believed that we will need this flag for a number of
path/plan types, not just sequential scans, which is why the flag is
generic rather than part of the SeqScan structures specifically.
Also, execParallel.c now gives parallel nodes a chance to initialize
their PlanState nodes from the DSM during parallel worker startup.
Amit Kapila, with a fair amount of adjustment by me. Review of previous
patch versions by Haribabu Kommi and others.
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.
The original implementation of TABLESAMPLE modeled the tablesample method
API on index access methods, which wasn't a good choice because, without
specialized DDL commands, there's no way to build an extension that can
implement a TSM. (Raw inserts into system catalogs are not an acceptable
thing to do, because we can't undo them during DROP EXTENSION, nor will
pg_upgrade behave sanely.) Instead adopt an API more like procedural
language handlers or foreign data wrappers, wherein the only SQL-level
support object needed is a single handler function identified by having
a special return type. This lets us get rid of the supporting catalog
altogether, so that no custom DDL support is needed for the feature.
Adjust the API so that it can support non-constant tablesample arguments
(the original coding assumed we could evaluate the argument expressions at
ExecInitSampleScan time, which is undesirable even if it weren't outright
unsafe), and discourage sampling methods from looking at invisible tuples.
Make sure that the BERNOULLI and SYSTEM methods are genuinely repeatable
within and across queries, as required by the SQL standard, and deal more
honestly with methods that can't support that requirement.
Make a full code-review pass over the tablesample additions, and fix
assorted bugs, omissions, infelicities, and cosmetic issues (such as
failure to put the added code stanzas in a consistent ordering).
Improve EXPLAIN's output of tablesample plans, too.
Back-patch to 9.5 so that we don't have to support the original API
in production.
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
There seems no prospect that any of this will ever be useful, and indeed
it's questionable whether some of it would work if it ever got called;
it's certainly not been exercised in a very long time, if ever. So let's
get rid of it, and make the comments about mark/restore in execAmi.c less
wishy-washy.
The mark/restore support for Result nodes is also currently dead code,
but that's due to planner limitations not because it's impossible that
it could be useful. So I left it in.
Get rid of the pernicious entanglement between planner and executor headers
introduced by commit 0b03e5951b.
Also, rearrange the CustomFoo struct/typedef definitions so that all the
typedef names are seen as used by the compiler. Without this pgindent
will mess things up a bit, which is not so important perhaps, but it also
removes a bizarre discrepancy between the declaration arrangement used for
CustomExecMethods and that used for CustomScanMethods and
CustomPathMethods.
Clean up the commentary around ExecSupportsMarkRestore to reflect the
rather large change in its API.
Const-ify register_custom_path_provider's argument. This necessitates
casting away const in the function, but that seems better than forcing
callers of the function to do so (or else not const-ify their method
pointer structs, which was sort of the whole point).
De-export fix_expr_common. I don't like the exporting of fix_scan_expr
or replace_nestloop_params either, but this one surely has got little
excuse.
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 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
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.
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.
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
an explicit model of rescan costs being different from first-time costs.
The costing of Material nodes in particular now has some visible relationship
to the actual runtime behavior, where before it was essentially fantasy.
This also fixes up a couple of places where different materialized plan types
were treated differently for no very good reason (probably just oversights).
A couple of the regression tests are affected, because the planner now chooses
to put the other relation on the inside of a nestloop-with-materialize.
So far as I can see both changes are sane, and the planner is now more
consistently following the expectation that it should prefer to materialize
the smaller of two relations.
Per a recent discussion with Robert Haas.
Tomas Vondra
Bruce Momjian
Michael Paquier
Amit Kapila
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Kevin Grittner
Alvaro Herrera
Andres Freund
Simon Riggs
Magnus Hagander