Aggregate nodes now have two new modes: a "partial" mode where they
output the unfinalized transition state, and a "finalize" mode where
they accept unfinalized transition states rather than individual
values as input.
These new modes are not used anywhere yet, but they will be necessary
for parallel aggregation. The infrastructure also figures to be
useful for cases where we want to aggregate local data and remote
data via the FDW interface, and want to bring back partial aggregates
from the remote side that can then be combined with locally generated
partial aggregates to produce the final value. It may also be useful
even when neither FDWs nor parallelism are in play, as explained in
the comments in nodeAgg.c.
David Rowley and Simon Riggs, reviewed by KaiGai Kohei, Heikki
Linnakangas, Haribabu Kommi, and me.
Before 9.4, such an aggregate couldn't be declared, because its final
function would have to have polymorphic result type but no polymorphic
argument, which CREATE FUNCTION would quite properly reject. The
ordered-set-aggregate patch found a workaround: allow the final function
to be declared as accepting additional dummy arguments that have types
matching the aggregate's regular input arguments. However, we failed
to notice that this problem applies just as much to regular aggregates,
despite the fact that we had a built-in regular aggregate array_agg()
that was known to be undeclarable in SQL because its final function
had an illegal signature. So what we should have done, and what this
patch does, is to decouple the extra-dummy-arguments behavior from
ordered-set aggregates and make it generally available for all aggregate
declarations. We have to put this into 9.4 rather than waiting till
later because it slightly alters the rules for declaring ordered-set
aggregates.
The patch turned out a bit bigger than I'd hoped because it proved
necessary to record the extra-arguments option in a new pg_aggregate
column. I'd thought we could just look at the final function's pronargs
at runtime, but that didn't work well for variadic final functions.
It's probably just as well though, because it simplifies life for pg_dump
to record the option explicitly.
While at it, fix array_agg() to have a valid final-function signature,
and add an opr_sanity test to notice future deviations from polymorphic
consistency. I also marked the percentile_cont() aggregates as not
needing extra arguments, since they don't.
Until now, when executing an aggregate function as a window function
within a window with moving frame start (that is, any frame start mode
except UNBOUNDED PRECEDING), we had to recalculate the aggregate from
scratch each time the frame head moved. This patch allows an aggregate
definition to include an alternate "moving aggregate" implementation
that includes an inverse transition function for removing rows from
the aggregate's running state. As long as this can be done successfully,
runtime is proportional to the total number of input rows, rather than
to the number of input rows times the average frame length.
This commit includes the core infrastructure, documentation, and regression
tests using user-defined aggregates. Follow-on commits will update some
of the built-in aggregates to use this feature.
David Rowley and Florian Pflug, reviewed by Dean Rasheed; additional
hacking by me
This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
Formerly the planner had a hard-wired rule of thumb for guessing the amount
of space consumed by an aggregate function's transition state data. This
estimate is critical to deciding whether it's OK to use hash aggregation,
and in many situations the built-in estimate isn't very good. This patch
adds a column to pg_aggregate wherein a per-aggregate estimate can be
provided, overriding the planner's default, and infrastructure for setting
the column via CREATE AGGREGATE.
It may be that additional smarts will be required in future, perhaps even
a per-aggregate estimation function. But this is already a step forward.
This is extracted from a larger patch to improve the performance of numeric
and int8 aggregates. I (tgl) thought it was worth reviewing and committing
this infrastructure separately. In this commit, all built-in aggregates
are given aggtransspace = 0, so no behavior should change.
Hadi Moshayedi, reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Tomas Vondra
There's no inherent reason why an aggregate function can't be variadic
(even VARIADIC ANY) if its transition function can handle the case.
Indeed, this patch to add the feature touches none of the planner or
executor, and little of the parser; the main missing stuff was DDL and
pg_dump support.
It is true that variadic aggregates can create the same sort of ambiguity
about parameters versus ORDER BY keys that was complained of when we
(briefly) had both one- and two-argument forms of string_agg(). However,
the policy formed in response to that discussion only said that we'd not
create any built-in aggregates with varying numbers of arguments, not that
we shouldn't allow users to do it. So the logical extension of that is
we can allow users to make variadic aggregates as long as we're wary about
shipping any such in core.
In passing, this patch allows aggregate function arguments to be named, to
the extent of remembering the names in pg_proc and dumping them in pg_dump.
You can't yet call an aggregate using named-parameter notation. That seems
like a likely future extension, but it'll take some work, and it's not what
this patch is really about. Likewise, there's still some work needed to
make window functions handle VARIADIC fully, but I left that for another
day.
initdb forced because of new aggvariadic field in Aggref parse nodes.
non-kluge method for controlling the order in which values are fed to an
aggregate function. At the same time eliminate the old implementation
restriction that DISTINCT was only supported for single-argument aggregates.
Possibly release-notable behavioral change: formerly, agg(DISTINCT x)
dropped null values of x unconditionally. Now, it does so only if the
agg transition function is strict; otherwise nulls are treated as DISTINCT
normally would, ie, you get one copy.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada
the opportunity to treat COUNT(*) as a zero-argument aggregate instead
of the old hack that equated it to COUNT(1); this is materially cleaner
(no more weird ANYOID cases) and ought to be at least a tiny bit faster.
Original patch by Sergey Koposov; review, documentation, simple regression
tests, pg_dump and psql support by moi.
large objects. Dump all these in pg_dump; also add code to pg_dump
user-defined conversions. Make psql's large object code rely on
the backend for inserting/deleting LOB comments, instead of trying to
hack pg_description directly. Documentation and regression tests added.
Christopher Kings-Lynne, code reviewed by Tom
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
Robert Haas
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Thomas G. Lockhart
Marc G. Fournier