Formerly, a Var referencing an already-dropped column was allowed and would
always produce a NULL value. However, that behavior was implemented in
slot_getattr which the new expression code doesn't use; thus there is now a
risk of returning theoretically-deleted data. We had regression test cases
that purported to exercise this, but they failed to expose any problem,
apparently because plpgsql filters the dropped column and produces an
output tuple that has a NULL there already.
Ideally the DROP or ALTER attempt in these test cases would get rejected
due to dependency checks; but until that happens, let's modify the behavior
so that we fail the query during executor start. This was already true for
the related case of a column having changed type underneath us, and there's
no obvious reason why we need to be laxer for dropped columns.
In passing, adjust the error messages in CheckVarSlotCompatibility to
include the composite type name. In the cases shown in the regression
tests this is always just "record", but it should be more useful in
actual stale-plan cases, where the slot tupdesc would be a table's
tupdesc directly.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16803.1490723570@sss.pgh.pa.us
In commit b8d7f053c, we needed to fix ExecEvalWholeRowVar to not change
the state of the slot it's copying. The initial quick hack at that
required two rounds of tuple construction, which is not very nice.
To fix, add another primitive to tuptoaster.c that does precisely what
we need. (I initially tried to do this by refactoring one of the
existing functions into two pieces; but it looked like that might hurt
performance for the existing case, and the amount of code that could
be shared is not very large, so I gave up on that.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/26088.1490315792@sss.pgh.pa.us
Both Andres and I were happy with "*op->resvalue = *op->resvalue;",
but Coverity isn't; and it has a point, because some compilers might
not be smart enough to elide that. So remove it. In passing, also
avoid doing unnecessary assignments to *op->resnull when it's already
known to have the right value.
This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
The speed gains primarily come from:
- non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
- simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
function calls
- sharing some state between different sub-expressions
- reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
nearly all of the previously used linked lists
- more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
constant re-checks at evaluation time
Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
- basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
statements. That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
initialization overhead is measurable.
- optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
work has already been made.
- optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
been made here too.
The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
backward-incompatible changes:
- Function permission checks are now done during expression
initialization, whereas previously they were done during
execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
different array type previously didn't perform checks.
- The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer. The behavior
around might still change.
Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
changes by Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
Tom Lane
Andres Freund