This patch adds the core-system infrastructure needed to support updates
on foreign tables, and extends contrib/postgres_fdw to allow updates
against remote Postgres servers. There's still a great deal of room for
improvement in optimization of remote updates, but at least there's basic
functionality there now.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Alexander Korotkov and Laurenz Albe, and rather
heavily revised by Tom Lane.
Include eval costs of local conditions in remote-estimate mode, and don't
assume the remote eval cost is zero in local-estimate mode. (The best
we can do with that at the moment is to assume a seqscan, which may well
be wildly pessimistic ... but zero won't do at all.)
To get a reasonable local estimate, we need to know the relpages count
for the remote rel, so improve the ANALYZE code to fetch that rather
than just setting the foreign table's relpages field to zero.
On reflection this method seems to be exposing an unreasonable amount of
implementation detail. It wouldn't matter when talking to a remote server
of the identical Postgres version, but it seems likely to make things worse
not better if the remote is a different version with different casting
infrastructure. Instead adopt ruleutils.c's policy of regurgitating the
cast as it was originally specified; including not showing it at all, if
it was implicit to start with. (We must do that because for some datatypes
explicit and implicit casts have different semantics.)
The only place we depended on that was in sending numeric type OIDs in
PQexecParams; but we can replace that usage with explicitly casting
each Param symbol in the query string, so that the types are specified
to the remote by name not OID. This makes no immediate difference but
will be essential if we ever hope to support use of non-builtin types.
Set the remote session's search path to exactly "pg_catalog" at session
start, then schema-qualify only names that aren't in that schema. This
greatly reduces clutter in the generated SQL commands, as seen in the
regression test changes. Per discussion.
Also, rethink use of FirstNormalObjectId as the "built-in object" cutoff
--- FirstBootstrapObjectId is safer, since the former will accept
objects in information_schema for instance.
There's still a lot of room for improvement, but it basically works,
and we need this to be present before we can do anything much with the
writable-foreign-tables patch. So let's commit it and get on with testing.
Shigeru Hanada, reviewed by KaiGai Kohei and Tom Lane
Tom Lane