sort order down into planner, instead of handling it only at the very top
level of the planner. This fixes many things. An explicit sort is now
avoided if there is a cheaper alternative (typically an indexscan) not
only for ORDER BY, but also for the internal sort of GROUP BY. It works
even when there is no other reason (such as a WHERE condition) to consider
the indexscan. It works for indexes on functions. It works for indexes
on functions, backwards. It's just so cool...
CAUTION: I have changed the representation of SortClause nodes, therefore
THIS UPDATE BREAKS STORED RULES. You will need to initdb.
store all ordering information in pathkeys lists (which are now lists of
lists of PathKeyItem nodes, not just lists of lists of vars). This was
a big win --- the code is smaller and IMHO more understandable than it
was, even though it handles more cases. I believe the node changes will
not force an initdb for anyone; planner nodes don't show up in stored
rules.
hashjoinable clause, not one path for a randomly-chosen element of each
set of clauses with the same join operator. That is, if you wrote
SELECT ... WHERE t1.f1 = t2.f2 and t1.f3 = t2.f4,
and both '=' ops were the same opcode (say, all four fields are int4),
then the system would either consider hashing on f1=f2 or on f3=f4,
but it would *not* consider both possibilities. Boo hiss.
Also, revise estimation of hashjoin costs to include a penalty when the
inner join var has a high disbursion --- ie, the most common value is
pretty common. This tends to lead to badly skewed hash bucket occupancy
and way more comparisons than you'd expect on average.
I imagine that the cost calculation still needs tweaking, but at least
it generates a more reasonable plan than before on George Young's example.
rels that the inner path needs to join to, but it was only checking for
the first one. Failure could only have been observed with an OR-clause
that mentions 3 or more tables, and then only if the bogus path was
actually selected as cheapest ...
remove optimizer's arbitrary limit on how large a join it will use hashing
for. (The limit was too large to prevent the problems we'd been seeing,
anyway...)
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Marc G. Fournier