predictable manner; in particular that if you say ORDER BY output-column-ref,
it will in fact sort by that specific column even if there are multiple
syntactic matches. An example is
SELECT random() AS a, random() AS b FROM ... ORDER BY b, a;
While the use-case for this might be a bit debatable, it worked as expected
in earlier releases, so we should preserve the behavior for 8.3. Per my
recent proposal.
While at it, fix convert_subquery_pathkeys() to handle RelabelType stripping
in both directions; it needs this for the same reasons make_sort_from_pathkeys
does.
to be able to discard top-level RelabelType nodes on *both* sides of the
equivalence-class-to-target-list comparison, since make_pathkey_from_sortinfo
might either add or remove a RelabelType. Also fix the latter to do the
removal case cleanly. Per example from Peter.
RelabelType nodes when the sort key is binary-compatible with the sort
operator rather than having exactly its input type. We did this correctly
for index columns but not sort keys, leading to failure to notice that
a varchar index matches an ORDER BY request. This requires a bit more work
in make_sort_from_pathkeys, but not anyplace else that I can find.
Per bug report and subsequent discussion.
This doubles the planning workload for mergejoins while not actually
accomplishing much. The only useful case is where one of the directions
matches the query's ORDER BY request; therefore, put a thumb on the scales
in that direction, and otherwise arbitrarily consider only the ASC direction.
(This is a lot easier now than it would've been before 8.3, since we have
more semantic knowledge embedded in PathKeys now.)
index key columns always have the type expected by the index's associated
operators, ie, we add RelabelType nodes when dealing with binary-compatible
index opclasses. This is needed to get varchar indexes to play nicely with
the new EquivalenceClass machinery, as per recent gripe from Josh Berkus that
CVS HEAD was failing to match a varchar index column to a constant restriction
in the query.
It seems likely that this change will allow removal of a lot of ugly ad-hoc
RelabelType-stripping that the planner has traditionally done while matching
expressions to other expressions, but I'll worry about that some other day.
possibly be any useful pathkeys --- to wit, queries with neither any
join clauses nor any ORDER BY request. It's nearly free to check for
this case and it saves a useful fraction of the planning time for simple
queries.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
subquery's pathkey is a RelabelType applied to something that appears
in the subquery's output; for example where the subquery returns a
varchar Var and the sort order is shown as that Var coerced to text.
This comes up because varchar doesn't have its own sort operator.
Per example from Peter Hardman.
requested sort order. It was assuming that build_index_pathkeys always
generates a pathkey per index column, which was not true if implied equality
deduction had determined that two index columns were effectively equated to
each other. Simplest fix seems to be to install an option that causes
build_index_pathkeys to support this behavior as well as the original one.
Per report from Brian Hirt.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
so that the latter estimates the number of groups that grouping will
produce. This is needed because it is primarily query_planner that
makes the decision between fast-start and fast-finish plans, and in the
original coding it was unable to make more than a crude rule-of-thumb
choice when the query involved grouping. This revision helps us make
saner choices for queries like SELECT ... GROUP BY ... LIMIT, as in a
recent example from Mark Kirkwood. Also move the responsibility for
canonicalizing sort_pathkeys and group_pathkeys into query_planner;
this information has to be available anyway to support the first change,
and doing it this way lets us get rid of compare_noncanonical_pathkeys
entirely.
propagated inside an outer join. In particular, given
LEFT JOIN ON (A = B) WHERE A = constant, we cannot conclude that
B = constant at the top level (B might be null instead), but we
can nonetheless put a restriction B = constant into the quals for
B's relation, since no inner-side rows not meeting that condition
can contribute to the final result. Similarly, given
FULL JOIN USING (J) WHERE J = constant, we can't directly conclude
that either input J variable = constant, but it's OK to push such
quals into each input rel. Per recent gripe from Kim Bisgaard.
Along the way, remove 'valid_everywhere' flag from RestrictInfo,
as on closer analysis it was not being used for anything, and was
defined backwards anyway.
of a relation in a flat 'joininfo' list. The former arrangement grouped
the join clauses according to the set of unjoined relids used in each;
however, profiling on test cases involving lots of joins proves that
that data structure is a net loss. It takes more time to group the
join clauses together than is saved by avoiding duplicate tests later.
It doesn't help any that there are usually not more than one or two
clauses per group ...
a new PlannerInfo struct, which is passed around instead of the bare
Query in all the planning code. This commit is essentially just a
code-beautification exercise, but it does open the door to making
larger changes to the planner data structures without having to muck
with the widely-known Query struct.
few palloc's. I also chose to eliminate the restype and restypmod fields
entirely, since they are redundant with information stored in the node's
contained expression; re-examining the expression at need seems simpler
and more reliable than trying to keep restype/restypmod up to date.
initdb forced due to change in contents of stored rules.
structs. There are many places in the planner where we were passing
both a rel and an index to subroutines, and now need only pass the
index struct. Notationally simpler, and perhaps a tad faster.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
1. Solve the problem of not having TOAST references hiding inside composite
values by establishing the rule that toasting only goes one level deep:
a tuple can contain toasted fields, but a composite-type datum that is
to be inserted into a tuple cannot. Enforcing this in heap_formtuple
is relatively cheap and it avoids a large increase in the cost of running
the tuptoaster during final storage of a row.
2. Fix some interesting problems in expansion of inherited queries that
reference whole-row variables. We never really did this correctly before,
but it's now relatively painless to solve by expanding the parent's
whole-row Var into a RowExpr() selecting the proper columns from the
child.
If you dike out the preventive check in CheckAttributeType(),
composite-type columns now seem to actually work. However, we surely
cannot ship them like this --- without I/O for composite types, you
can't get pg_dump to dump tables containing them. So a little more
work still to do.
In the past, we used a 'Lispy' linked list implementation: a "list" was
merely a pointer to the head node of the list. The problem with that
design is that it makes lappend() and length() linear time. This patch
fixes that problem (and others) by maintaining a count of the list
length and a pointer to the tail node along with each head node pointer.
A "list" is now a pointer to a structure containing some meta-data
about the list; the head and tail pointers in that structure refer
to ListCell structures that maintain the actual linked list of nodes.
The function names of the list API have also been changed to, I hope,
be more logically consistent. By default, the old function names are
still available; they will be disabled-by-default once the rest of
the tree has been updated to use the new API names.
and hash bucket-size estimation. Issue has been there awhile but is more
critical in 7.4 because it affects varchar columns. Per report from
Greg Stark.
node emits only those vars that are actually needed above it in the
plan tree. (There were comments in the code suggesting that this was
done at some point in the dim past, but for a long time we have just
made join nodes emit everything that either input emitted.) Aside from
being marginally more efficient, this fixes the problem noted by Peter
Eisentraut where a join above an IN-implemented-as-join might fail,
because the subplan targetlist constructed in the latter case didn't
meet the expectation of including everything.
Along the way, fix some places that were O(N^2) in the targetlist
length. This is not all the trouble spots for wide queries by any
means, but it's a step forward.
of an index can now be a computed expression instead of a simple variable.
Restrictions on expressions are the same as for predicates (only immutable
functions, no sub-selects). This fixes problems recently introduced with
inlining SQL functions, because the inlining transformation is applied to
both expression trees so the planner can still match them up. Along the
way, improve efficiency of handling index predicates (both predicates and
index expressions are now cached by the relcache) and fix 7.3 oversight
that didn't record dependencies of predicate expressions.
Without this fix, CVS tip dumps core when running the regression tests
with geqo_threshold = 2. I would think that a similar patch might be
needed in 7.3, but cannot duplicate the failure in that branch --- so
for now, leave well enough alone.
the outer query. (The implementation is a bit klugy, but it would take
nontrivial restructuring to make it nicer, which this is probably not
worth.) This avoids unnecessary sort steps in examples like
SELECT foo,count(*) FROM (SELECT ... ORDER BY foo,bar) sub GROUP BY foo
which means there is now a reasonable technique for controlling the
order of inputs to custom aggregates, even in the grouping case.
of known-equal expressions includes any constant expressions (including
Params from outer queries), we actively suppress any 'var = var'
clauses that are or could be deduced from the set, generating only the
deducible 'var = const' clauses instead. The idea here is to push down
the restrictions implied by the equality set to base relations whenever
possible. Once we have applied the 'var = const' clauses, the 'var = var'
clauses are redundant, and should be suppressed both to save work at
execution and to avoid double-counting restrictivity.
containing a volatile function), rather than only on 'Var = Var' clauses
as before. This makes it practical to do flatten_join_alias_vars at the
start of planning, which in turn eliminates a bunch of klugery inside the
planner to deal with alias vars. As a free side effect, we now detect
implied equality of non-Var expressions; for example in
SELECT ... WHERE a.x = b.y and b.y = 42
we will deduce a.x = 42 and use that as a restriction qual on a. Also,
we can remove the restriction introduced 12/5/02 to prevent pullup of
subqueries whose targetlists contain sublinks.
Still TODO: make statistical estimation routines in selfuncs.c and costsize.c
smarter about expressions that are more complex than plain Vars. The need
for this is considerably greater now that we have to be able to estimate
the suitability of merge and hash join techniques on such expressions.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway