Previously, we had the WITH clause in the middle of the command, where
you'd specify both generic options as well as statistic types. Few
people liked this, so this commit changes it to remove the WITH keyword
from that clause and makes it accept statistic types only. (We
currently don't have any generic options, but if we invent in the
future, we will gain a new WITH clause, probably at the end of the
command).
Also, the column list is now specified without parens, which makes the
whole command look more similar to a SELECT command. This change will
let us expand the command to supporting expressions (not just columns
names) as well as multiple tables and their join conditions.
Tom added lots of code comments and fixed some parts of the CREATE
STATISTICS reference page, too; more changes in this area are
forthcoming. He also fixed a potential problem in the alter_generic
regression test, reducing verbosity on a cascaded drop to avoid
dependency on message ordering, as we do in other tests.
Tom also closed a security bug: we documented that table ownership was
required in order to create a statistics object on it, but didn't
actually implement it.
Implement tab-completion for statistics objects. This can stand some
more improvement.
Authors: Alvaro Herrera, with lots of cleanup by Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170420212426.ltvgyhnefvhixm6i@alvherre.pgsql
Add support for explicitly declared statistic objects (CREATE
STATISTICS), allowing collection of statistics on more complex
combinations that individual table columns. Companion commands DROP
STATISTICS and ALTER STATISTICS ... OWNER TO / SET SCHEMA / RENAME are
added too. All this DDL has been designed so that more statistic types
can be added later on, such as multivariate most-common-values and
multivariate histograms between columns of a single table, leaving room
for permitting columns on multiple tables, too, as well as expressions.
This commit only adds support for collection of n-distinct coefficient
on user-specified sets of columns in a single table. This is useful to
estimate number of distinct groups in GROUP BY and DISTINCT clauses;
estimation errors there can cause over-allocation of memory in hashed
aggregates, for instance, so it's a worthwhile problem to solve. A new
special pseudo-type pg_ndistinct is used.
(num-distinct estimation was deemed sufficiently useful by itself that
this is worthwhile even if no further statistic types are added
immediately; so much so that another version of essentially the same
functionality was submitted by Kyotaro Horiguchi:
https://postgr.es/m/20150828.173334.114731693.horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp
though this commit does not use that code.)
Author: Tomas Vondra. Some code rework by Álvaro.
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, David Rowley, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Jeff Janes,
Ideriha Takeshi
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/543AFA15.4080608@fuzzy.czhttps://postgr.es/m/20170320190220.ixlaueanxegqd5gr@alvherre.pgsql
