If a GROUP BY clause includes all columns of a non-deferred primary key,
as well as other columns of the same relation, those other columns are
redundant and can be dropped from the grouping; the pkey is enough to
ensure that each row of the table corresponds to a separate group.
Getting rid of the excess columns will reduce the cost of the sorting or
hashing needed to implement GROUP BY, and can indeed remove the need for
a sort step altogether.
This seems worth testing for since many query authors are not aware of
the GROUP-BY-primary-key exception to the rule about queries not being
allowed to reference non-grouped-by columns in their targetlists or
HAVING clauses. Thus, redundant GROUP BY items are not uncommon. Also,
we can make the test pretty cheap in most queries where it won't help
by not looking up a rel's primary key until we've found that at least
two of its columns are in GROUP BY.
David Rowley, reviewed by Julien Rouhaud
Commit 45f6240a8f added an assumption in ExecHashIncreaseNumBatches
and ExecHashIncreaseNumBuckets that they could find all tuples in the main
hash table by iterating over the "dense storage" introduced by that patch.
However, ExecHashRemoveNextSkewBucket continued its old practice of simply
re-linking deleted skew tuples into the main table's hashchains. Hence,
such tuples got lost during any subsequent increase in nbatch or nbuckets,
and would never get joined, as reported in bug #13908 from Seth P.
I (tgl) think that the aforesaid commit has got multiple design issues
and should be reworked rather completely; but there is no time for that
right now, so band-aid the problem by making ExecHashRemoveNextSkewBucket
physically copy deleted skew tuples into the "dense storage" arena.
The added test case is able to exhibit the problem by means of fooling the
planner with a WHERE condition that it will underestimate the selectivity
of, causing the initial nbatch estimate to be too small.
Tomas Vondra and Tom Lane. Thanks to David Johnston for initial
investigation into the bug report.
More fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich exposed that the planner did not
cope well with chains of lateral references. If relation X references Y
laterally, and Y references Z laterally, then we will have to scan X on the
inside of a nestloop with Z, so for all intents and purposes X is laterally
dependent on Z too. The planner did not understand this and would generate
intermediate joins that could not be used. While that was usually harmless
except for wasting some planning cycles, under the right circumstances it
would lead to "failed to build any N-way joins" or "could not devise a
query plan" planner failures.
To fix that, convert the existing per-relation lateral_relids and
lateral_referencers relid sets into their transitive closures; that is,
they now show all relations on which a rel is directly or indirectly
laterally dependent. This not only fixes the chained-reference problem
but allows some of the relevant tests to be made substantially simpler
and faster, since they can be reduced to simple bitmap manipulations
instead of searches of the LateralJoinInfo list.
Also, when a PlaceHolderVar that is due to be evaluated at a join contains
lateral references, we should treat those references as indirect lateral
dependencies of each of the join's base relations. This prevents us from
trying to join any individual base relations to the lateral reference
source before the join is formed, which again cannot work.
Andreas' testing also exposed another oversight in the "dangerous
PlaceHolderVar" test added in commit 85e5e222b1. Simply rejecting
unsafe join paths in joinpath.c is insufficient, because in some cases
we will end up rejecting *all* possible paths for a particular join, again
leading to "could not devise a query plan" failures. The restriction has
to be known also to join_is_legal and its cohort functions, so that they
will not select a join for which that will happen. I chose to move the
supporting logic into joinrels.c where the latter functions are.
Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL support was introduced.
It was possible for the planner to decide to join a LATERAL subquery to
the outer side of an outer join before the outer join itself is completed.
Normally that's fine because of the associativity rules, but it doesn't
work if the subquery contains a lateral reference to the inner side of the
outer join. In such a situation the outer join *must* be done first.
join_is_legal() missed this consideration and would allow the join to be
attempted, but the actual path-building code correctly decided that no
valid join path could be made, sometimes leading to planner errors such as
"failed to build any N-way joins".
Per report from Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL
support was added.
In commit 95f4e59c32 I added a regression test case that examined
the plan of a query on system catalogs. That isn't a terribly great idea
because the catalogs tend to change from version to version, or even
within a version if someone makes an unrelated regression-test change that
populates the catalogs a bit differently. Usually I try to make planner
test cases rely on test tables that have not changed since Berkeley days,
but I got sloppy in this case because the submitted crasher example queried
the catalogs and I didn't spend enough time on rewriting it. But it was a
problem waiting to happen, as I was rudely reminded when I tried to port
that patch into Salesforce's Postgres variant :-(. So spend a little more
effort and rewrite the query to not use any system catalogs. I verified
that this version still provokes the Assert if 95f4e59c32866716's code fix
is reverted.
I also removed the EXPLAIN output from the test, as it turns out that the
assertion occurs while considering a plan that isn't the one ultimately
selected anyway; so there's no value in risking any cross-platform
variation in that printout.
Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch.
One of the changes I made in commit 8703059c6b turns out not to have
been such a good idea: we still need the exception in join_is_legal() that
allows a join if both inputs already overlap the RHS of the special join
we're checking. Otherwise we can miss valid plans, and might indeed fail
to find a plan at all, as in recent report from Andreas Seltenreich.
That code was added way back in commit c17117649b, but I failed to
include a regression test case then; my bad. Put it back with a better
explanation, and a test this time. The logic does end up a bit different
than before though: I now believe it's appropriate to make this check
first, thereby allowing such a case whether or not we'd consider the
previous SJ(s) to commute with this one. (Presumably, we already decided
they did; but it was confusing to have this consideration in the middle
of the code that was handling the other case.)
Back-patch to all active branches, like the previous patch.
Until now we computed these Param ID sets at the end of subquery_planner,
but that approach depends on subquery_planner returning a concrete Plan
tree. We would like to switch over to returning one or more Paths for a
subquery, and in that representation the necessary details aren't fully
fleshed out (not to mention that we don't really want to do this work for
Paths that end up getting discarded). Hence, refactor so that we can
compute the param ID sets at the end of planning, just before
set_plan_references is run.
The main change necessary to make this work is that we need to capture
the set of outer-level Param IDs available to the current query level
before exiting subquery_planner, since the outer levels' plan_params lists
are transient. (That's not going to pose a problem for returning Paths,
since all the work involved in producing that data is part of expression
preprocessing, which will continue to happen before Paths are produced.)
On the plus side, this change gets rid of several existing kluges.
Eventually I'd like to get rid of SS_finalize_plan altogether in favor of
doing this work during set_plan_references, but that will require some
complex rejiggering because SS_finalize_plan needs to visit subplans and
initplans before the main plan. So leave that idea for another day.
Commit 85e5e222b1 turns out not to have taken
care of all cases of the partially-evaluatable-PlaceHolderVar problem found
by Andreas Seltenreich's fuzz testing. I had set it up to check for risky
PHVs only in the event that we were making a star-schema-based exception to
the param_source_rels join ordering heuristic. However, it turns out that
the problem can occur even in joins that satisfy the param_source_rels
heuristic, in which case allow_star_schema_join() isn't consulted.
Refactor so that we check for risky PHVs whenever the proposed join has
any remaining parameterization.
Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch (except for the regression test
case, which only works back to 9.3 because it uses LATERAL).
Note that this discovery implies that problems of this sort could've
occurred in 9.2 and up even before the star-schema patch; though I've not
tried to prove that experimentally.
A new test case from Andreas Seltenreich showed that we were still a bit
confused about removing PlaceHolderVars during join removal. Specifically,
remove_rel_from_query would remove a PHV that was used only underneath
the removable join, even if the place where it's used was the join partner
relation and not the join clause being deleted. This would lead to a
"too late to create a new PlaceHolderInfo" error later on. We can defend
against that by checking ph_eval_at to see if the PHV could possibly be
getting used at some partner rel.
Also improve some nearby LATERAL-related logic. I decided that the check
on ph_lateral needed to take precedence over the check on ph_needed, in
case there's a lateral reference underneath the join being considered.
(That may be impossible, but I'm not convinced of it, and it's easy enough
to defend against the case.) Also, I realized that remove_rel_from_query's
logic for updating LateralJoinInfos is dead code, because we don't build
those at all until after join removal.
Back-patch to 9.3. Previous versions didn't have the LATERAL issues, of
course, and they also didn't attempt to remove PlaceHolderInfos during join
removal. (I'm starting to wonder if changing that was really such a great
idea.)
Commit 9e7e29c75a introduced an Assert that
join removal didn't reduce the eval_at set of any PlaceHolderVar to empty.
At first glance it looks like join_is_removable ensures that's true --- but
actually, the loop in join_is_removable skips PlaceHolderVars that are not
referenced above the join due to be removed. So, if we don't want any
empty eval_at sets, the right thing to do is to delete any now-unreferenced
PlaceHolderVars from the data structure entirely.
Per fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to 9.3 where the
aforesaid Assert was added.
Further testing revealed that commit f69b4b9495 was still a few
bricks shy of a load: minor tweaking of the previous test cases resulted
in the same wrong-outer-join-order problem coming back. After study
I concluded that my previous changes in make_outerjoininfo() were just
accidentally masking the problem, and should be reverted in favor of
forcing syntactic join order whenever an upper outer join's predicate
doesn't mention a lower outer join's LHS. This still allows the
chained-outer-joins style that is the normally optimizable case.
I also tightened things up some more in join_is_legal(). It seems to me
on review that what's really happening in the exception case where we
ignore a mismatched special join is that we're allowing the proposed join
to associate into the RHS of the outer join we're comparing it to. As
such, we should *always* insist that the proposed join be a left join,
which eliminates a bunch of rather dubious argumentation. The case where
we weren't enforcing that was the one that was already known buggy anyway
(it had a violatable Assert before the aforesaid commit) so it hardly
deserves a lot of deference.
Back-patch to all active branches, like the previous patch. The added
regression test case failed in all branches back to 9.1, and I think it's
only an unrelated change in costing calculations that kept 9.0 from
choosing a broken plan.
In commit b514a7460d, I changed the planner
so that it would allow nestloop paths to remain partially parameterized,
ie the inner relation might need parameters from both the current outer
relation and some upper-level outer relation. That's fine so long as we're
talking about distinct parameters; but the patch also allowed creation of
nestloop paths for cases where the inner relation's parameter was a
PlaceHolderVar whose eval_at set included the current outer relation and
some upper-level one. That does *not* work.
In principle we could allow such a PlaceHolderVar to be evaluated at the
lower join node using values passed down from the upper relation along with
values from the join's own outer relation. However, nodeNestloop.c only
supports simple Vars not arbitrary expressions as nestloop parameters.
createplan.c is also a few bricks shy of being able to handle such cases;
it misplaces the PlaceHolderVar parameters in the plan tree, which is why
the visible symptoms of this bug are "plan should not reference subplan's
variable" and "failed to assign all NestLoopParams to plan nodes" planner
errors.
Adding the necessary complexity to make this work doesn't seem like it
would be repaid in significantly better plans, because in cases where such
a PHV exists, there is probably a corresponding join order constraint that
would allow a good plan to be found without using the star-schema exception.
Furthermore, adding complexity to nodeNestloop.c would create a run-time
penalty even for plans where this whole consideration is irrelevant.
So let's just reject such paths instead.
Per fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich; the added regression test is based
on his example query. Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch.
An outer join clause that didn't actually reference the RHS (perhaps only
after constant-folding) could confuse the join order enforcement logic,
leading to wrong query results. Also, nested occurrences of such things
could trigger an Assertion that on reflection seems incorrect.
Per fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich. The practical use of such cases
seems thin enough that it's not too surprising we've not heard field
reports about it.
This has been broken for a long time, so back-patch to all active branches.
In many cases, we can implement a semijoin as a plain innerjoin by first
passing the righthand-side relation through a unique-ification step.
However, one of the cases where this does NOT work is where the RHS has
a LATERAL reference to the LHS; that makes the RHS dependent on the LHS
so that unique-ification is meaningless. joinpath.c understood this,
and so would not generate any join paths of this kind ... but join_is_legal
neglected to check for the case, so it would think that we could do it.
The upshot would be a "could not devise a query plan for the given query"
failure once we had failed to generate any join paths at all for the bogus
join pair.
Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL was added.
join_clause_is_movable_into() is approximate, in the sense that it might
sometimes return "false" when actually it would be valid to push the given
join clause down to the specified level. This is okay ... but there was
an Assert in get_joinrel_parampathinfo() that's only safe if the answers
are always exact. Comment out the Assert, and add a bunch of commentary
to clarify what's going on.
Per fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich. The added regression test is
a pretty silly query, but it's based on his crasher example.
Back-patch to 9.2 where the faulty logic was introduced.
I missed a restriction that commit f4abd0241d
should have enforced: we can't pull up an empty-FROM subquery if it's under
an outer join, because then we'd need to wrap its output columns in
PlaceHolderVars. As the code currently stands, the PHVs end up with empty
relid sets, which doesn't work (and is correctly caught by an Assert).
It's possible that this could be fixed by assigning the PHVs the relid
sets of the parent FromExpr/JoinExpr, but getting that to work is more
complication than I care to add right now; indeed it's likely that
we'll never bother, since pulling up empty-FROM subqueries is a rather
marginal optimization anyway.
Per report from Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to 9.5 where the faulty
code was added.
The planner generally expects that the estimated rowcount of any relation
is at least one row, *unless* it has been proven empty by constraint
exclusion or similar mechanisms, which is marked by installing a dummy path
as the rel's cheapest path (cf. IS_DUMMY_REL). When I split up
allpaths.c's processing of base rels into separate set_base_rel_sizes and
set_base_rel_pathlists steps, the intention was that dummy rels would get
marked as such during the "set size" step; this is what justifies an Assert
in indxpath.c's get_loop_count that other relations should either be dummy
or have positive rowcount. Unfortunately I didn't get that quite right
for append relations: if all the child rels have been proven empty then
set_append_rel_size would come up with a rowcount of zero, which is
correct, but it didn't then do set_dummy_rel_pathlist. (We would have
ended up with the right state after set_append_rel_pathlist, but that's
too late, if we generate indexpaths for some other rel first.)
In addition to fixing the actual bug, I installed an Assert enforcing this
convention in set_rel_size; that then allows simplification of a couple
of now-redundant tests for zero rowcount in set_append_rel_size.
Also, to cover the possibility that third-party FDWs have been careless
about not returning a zero rowcount estimate, apply clamp_row_est to
whatever an FDW comes up with as the rows estimate.
Per report from Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to 9.2. Earlier branches
did not have the separation between set_base_rel_sizes and
set_base_rel_pathlists steps, so there was no intermediate state where an
appendrel would have had inconsistent rowcount and pathlist. It's possible
that adding the Assert to set_rel_size would be a good idea in older
branches too; but since they're not under development any more, it's likely
not worth the trouble.
An outer join appearing within the RHS of an antijoin can't commute with
the antijoin, but somehow I missed teaching make_outerjoininfo() about
that. In Teodor Sigaev's recent trouble report, this manifests as a
"could not find RelOptInfo for given relids" error within eqjoinsel();
but I think silently wrong query results are possible too, if the planner
misorders the joins and doesn't happen to trigger any internal consistency
checks. It's broken as far back as we had antijoins, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
Previously we would re-use input subexpressions in all expression trees
attached to a Join plan node. However, if it's an outer join and the
subexpression appears in the nullable-side input, this is potentially
incorrect for apparently-matching subexpressions that came from above
the outer join (ie, targetlist and qpqual expressions), because the
executor will treat the subexpression value as NULL when maybe it should
not be.
The case is fairly hard to hit because (a) you need a non-strict
subexpression (else NULL is correct), and (b) we don't usually compute
expressions in the outputs of non-toplevel plan nodes. But we might do
so if the expressions are sort keys for a mergejoin, for example.
Probably in the long run we should make a more explicit distinction between
Vars appearing above and below an outer join, but that will be a major
planner redesign and not at all back-patchable. For the moment, just hack
set_join_references so that it will not match any non-Var expressions
coming from nullable inputs to expressions that came from above the join.
(This is somewhat overkill, in that a strict expression could still be
matched, but it doesn't seem worth the effort to check that.)
Per report from Qingqing Zhou. The added regression test case is based
on his example.
This has been broken for a very long time, so back-patch to all active
branches.
We can't handle this in the general case due to limitations of the
planner's data representations; but we can allow it in many useful cases,
by being careful to flatten only when we are pulling a single-row subquery
up into a FROM (or, equivalently, inner JOIN) node that will still have at
least one remaining relation child. Per discussion of an example from
Kyotaro Horiguchi.
While poking at David Kubečka's issue I noticed an ancient logic error
in get_loop_count(): it used 1.0 as a "no data yet" indicator, but since
that is actually a valid rowcount estimate, this doesn't work. If we
have one input relation with 1.0 as rowcount and then another one with
a larger rowcount, we should use 1.0 as the result, but we picked the
larger rowcount instead. (I think when I coded this, I recognized the
conflict, but mistakenly thought that the logic would pick the desired
count anyway.)
Fixing this changed the plan for one existing regression test case.
Since the point of that test is to exercise creation of a particular
shape of nestloop plan, I tweaked the query a little bit so it still
results in the same plan choice.
This is definitely a bug, but I'm hesitant to back-patch since it might
change plan choices unexpectedly, and anyway failure to implement a
heuristic precisely as intended is a pretty low-grade bug.
Error messages informing the user that no such column exists can
sometimes provoke a perplexed response. This often happens due to
a subtle typo in the column name or, perhaps less likely, in the
alias name. To speed discovery of what the real issue is in such
cases, we'll now search the range table for approximate matches.
If there are one or two such matches that are good enough to think
that they might be what the user intended to type, and better than
all other approximate matches, we'll issue a hint suggesting that
the user might have intended to reference those columns.
Peter Geoghegan and Robert Haas
Part of the intent of the parameterized-path mechanism was to handle
star-schema queries efficiently, but some overly-restrictive search
limiting logic added in commit e2fa76d80b
prevented such cases from working as desired. Fix that and add a
regression test about it. Per gripe from Marc Cousin.
This is arguably a bug rather than a new feature, so back-patch to 9.2
where parameterized paths were introduced.
The code I added in commit f343a880d5 was
careless about preserving AND/OR flatness: it could create a structure with
an OR node directly underneath another one. That breaks an assumption
that's fairly important for planning efficiency, not to mention triggering
various Asserts (as reported by Benjamin Smith). Add a trifle more logic
to handle the case properly.
We can remove a left join to a relation if the relation's output is
provably distinct for the columns involved in the join clause (considering
only equijoin clauses) and the relation supplies no variables needed above
the join. Previously, the join removal logic could only prove distinctness
by reference to unique indexes of a table. This patch extends the logic
to consider subquery relations, wherein distinctness might be proven by
reference to GROUP BY, DISTINCT, etc.
We actually already had some code to check that a subquery's output was
provably distinct, but it was hidden inside pathnode.c; which was a pretty
bad place for it really, since that file is mostly boilerplate Path
construction and comparison. Move that code to analyzejoins.c, which is
arguably a more appropriate location, and is certainly the site of the
new usage for it.
David Rowley, reviewed by Simon Riggs
Although this bug is already fixed in post-9.2 branches, the case
triggering it is quite different from what was under consideration
at the time. It seems worth memorializing this example in HEAD
just to make sure it doesn't get broken again in future.
Extracted from commit 187ae17300.
This reverts commit ee1e5662d8, as well as
a remarkably large number of followup commits, which were mostly concerned
with the fact that the implementation didn't work terribly well. It still
doesn't: we probably need some rather basic work in the GUC infrastructure
if we want to fully support GUCs whose default varies depending on the
value of another GUC. Meanwhile, it also emerged that there wasn't really
consensus in favor of the definition the patch tried to implement (ie,
effective_cache_size should default to 4 times shared_buffers). So whack
it all back to where it was. In a followup commit, I'll do what was
recently agreed to, which is to simply change the default to a higher
value.
When pulling a "postponed" qual from a LATERAL subquery up into the quals
of an outer join, we must make sure that the postponed qual is included
in those seen by make_outerjoininfo(). Otherwise we might compute a
too-small min_lefthand or min_righthand for the outer join, leading to
"JOIN qualification cannot refer to other relations" failures from
distribute_qual_to_rels. Subtler errors in the created plan seem possible,
too, if the extra qual would only affect join ordering constraints.
Per bug #9041 from David Leverton. Back-patch to 9.3.
On second thought, commit 0c051c9008 was
over-hasty: rather than allowing this case, we ought to reject it for now.
That leaves the field clear for a future feature that allows the target
table to be re-specified in the FROM (or USING) clause, which will enable
left-joining the target table to something else. We can then also allow
LATERAL references to such an explicitly re-specified target table.
But allowing them right now will create ambiguities or worse for such a
feature, and it isn't something we documented 9.3 as supporting.
While at it, add a convenience subroutine to avoid having several copies
of the ereport for disalllowed-LATERAL-reference cases.
I failed to think much about UPDATE/DELETE when implementing LATERAL :-(.
The implemented behavior ended up being that subqueries in the FROM or
USING clause (respectively) could access the update/delete target table as
though it were a lateral reference; which seems fine if they said LATERAL,
but certainly ought to draw an error if they didn't. Fix it so you get a
suitable error when you omit LATERAL. Per report from Emre Hasegeli.
It's possible to extract a restriction OR clause from a join clause that
has the form of an OR-of-ANDs, if each sub-AND includes a clause that
mentions only one specific relation. While PG has been aware of that idea
for many years, the code previously only did it if it could extract an
indexable OR clause. On reflection, though, that seems a silly limitation:
adding a restriction clause can be a win by reducing the number of rows
that have to be filtered at the join step, even if we have to test the
clause as a plain filter clause during the scan. This should be especially
useful for foreign tables, where the change can cut the number of rows that
have to be retrieved from the foreign server; but testing shows it can win
even on local tables. Per a suggestion from Robert Haas.
As a heuristic, I made the code accept an extracted restriction clause
if its estimated selectivity is less than 0.9, which will probably result
in accepting extracted clauses just about always. We might need to tweak
that later based on experience.
Since the code no longer has even a weak connection to Path creation,
remove orindxpath.c and create a new file optimizer/util/orclauses.c.
There's some additional janitorial cleanup of now-dead code that needs
to happen, but it seems like that's a fit subject for a separate commit.
Make the COPY test, which loads most of the large static tables used in
the tests, also explicitly ANALYZE those tables. This allows us to get
rid of various ad-hoc, and rather redundant, ANALYZE commands that had
gotten stuck into various test scripts over time to ensure we got
consistent plan choices. (We could have done a database-wide ANALYZE,
but that would cause stats to get attached to the small static tables
too, which results in plan changes compared to the historical behavior.
I'm not sure that's a good idea, so not going that far for now.)
Back-patch to 9.0, since 9.0 and 9.1 are currently sometimes failing
regression tests for lack of an "ANALYZE tenk1" in the subselect test.
There's no need for this in 8.4 since we didn't print any plans back
then.
pullup_replace_vars()'s decisions about whether a pulled-up replacement
expression needs to be wrapped in a PlaceHolderVar depend on the assumption
that what looks like a Var behaves like a Var. However, if the Var is a
join alias reference, later flattening of join aliases might replace the
Var with something that's not a Var at all, and should have been wrapped.
To fix, do a forcible pass of flatten_join_alias_vars() on the subquery
targetlist before we start to copy items out of it. We'll re-run that
processing on the pulled-up expressions later, but that's harmless.
Per report from Ken Tanzer; the added regression test case is based on his
example. This bug has been there since the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was
invented, but has escaped detection because the circumstances that trigger
it are fairly narrow. You need a flattenable query underneath an outer
join, which contains another flattenable query inside a join of its own,
with a dangerous expression (a constant or something else non-strict)
in that one's targetlist.
Having seen this, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be prudent to do all
alias-variable flattening earlier, perhaps even in the rewriter.
But that would probably not be a back-patchable change.
Bug #8591 from Claudio Freire demonstrates that get_eclass_for_sort_expr
must be able to compute valid em_nullable_relids for any new equivalence
class members it creates. I'd worried about this in the commit message
for db9f0e1d9a, but claimed that it wasn't a
problem because multi-member ECs should already exist when it runs. That
is transparently wrong, though, because this function is also called by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses, which runs during deconstruct_jointree.
The example given in the bug report (which the new regression test item
is based upon) fails because the COALESCE() expression is first seen by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses rather than process_equivalence.
Fixing this requires passing the appropriate nullable_relids set to
get_eclass_for_sort_expr, and it requires new code to compute that set
for top-level expressions such as ORDER BY, GROUP BY, etc. We store
the top-level nullable_relids in a new field in PlannerInfo to avoid
computing it many times. In the back branches, I've added the new
field at the end of the struct to minimize ABI breakage for planner
plugins. There doesn't seem to be a good alternative to changing
get_eclass_for_sort_expr's API signature, though. There probably aren't
any third-party extensions calling that function directly; moreover,
if there are, they probably need to think about what to pass for
nullable_relids anyway.
Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch in this area.
Although the SQL spec forbids duplicate table aliases, historically
we've allowed queries like
SELECT ... FROM tab1 x CROSS JOIN (tab2 x CROSS JOIN tab3 y) z
on the grounds that the aliased join (z) hides the aliases within it,
therefore there is no conflict between the two RTEs named "x". The
LATERAL patch broke this, on the misguided basis that "x" could be
ambiguous if tab3 were a LATERAL subquery. To avoid breaking existing
queries, it's better to allow this situation and complain only if
tab3 actually does contain an ambiguous reference. We need only remove
the check that was throwing an error, because the column lookup code
is already prepared to handle ambiguous references. Per bug #8444.
In an example such as
SELECT * FROM
i LEFT JOIN LATERAL (SELECT * FROM j WHERE i.n = j.n) j ON true;
it is safe to pull up the LATERAL subquery into its parent, but we must
then treat the "i.n = j.n" clause as a qual clause of the LEFT JOIN. The
previous coding in deconstruct_recurse mistakenly labeled the clause as
"is_pushed_down", resulting in wrong semantics if the clause were applied
at the join node, as per an example submitted awhile ago by Jeremy Evans.
To fix, postpone processing of such clauses until we return back up to
the appropriate recursion depth in deconstruct_recurse.
In addition, tighten the is-safe-to-pull-up checks in is_simple_subquery;
we previously missed the possibility that the LATERAL subquery might itself
contain an outer join that makes lateral references in lower quals unsafe.
A regression test case equivalent to Jeremy's example was already in my
commit of yesterday, but was giving the wrong results because of this
bug. This patch fixes the expected output for that, and also adds a
test case for the second problem.
The planner largely failed to consider the possibility that a
PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain a lateral reference to a Var
coming from somewhere outside the PHV's syntactic scope. We had a previous
report of a problem in this area, which I tried to fix in a quick-hack way
in commit 4da6439bd8, but Antonin Houska
pointed out that there were still some problems, and investigation turned
up other issues. This patch largely reverts that commit in favor of a more
thoroughly thought-through solution. The new theory is that a PHV's
ph_eval_at level cannot be higher than its original syntactic level. If it
contains lateral references, those don't change the ph_eval_at level, but
rather they create a lateral-reference requirement for the ph_eval_at join
relation. The code in joinpath.c needs to handle that.
Another issue is that createplan.c wasn't handling nested PlaceHolderVars
properly.
In passing, push knowledge of lateral-reference checks for join clauses
into join_clause_is_movable_to. This is mainly so that FDWs don't need
to deal with it.
This patch doesn't fix the original join-qual-placement problem reported by
Jeremy Evans (and indeed, one of the new regression test cases shows the
wrong answer because of that). But the PlaceHolderVar problems need to be
fixed before that issue can be addressed, so committing this separately
seems reasonable.
The planner logic that attempted to make a preliminary estimate of the
ph_needed levels for PlaceHolderVars seems to be completely broken by
lateral references. Fortunately, the potential join order optimization
that this code supported seems to be of relatively little value in
practice; so let's just get rid of it rather than trying to fix it.
Getting rid of this allows fairly substantial simplifications in
placeholder.c, too, so planning in such cases should be a bit faster.
Issue noted while pursuing bugs reported by Jeremy Evans and Antonin
Houska, though this doesn't in itself fix either of their reported cases.
What this does do is prevent an Assert crash in the kind of query
illustrated by the added regression test. (I'm not sure that the plan for
that query is stable enough across platforms to be usable as a regression
test output ... but we'll soon find out from the buildfarm.)
Back-patch to 9.3. The problem case can't arise without LATERAL, so
no need to touch older branches.
This patch gets rid of the concept of, and infrastructure for,
non-canonical PathKeys; we now only ever create canonical pathkey lists.
The need for non-canonical pathkeys came from the desire to have
grouping_planner initialize query_pathkeys and related pathkey lists before
calling query_planner. However, since query_planner didn't actually *do*
anything with those lists before they'd been made canonical, we can get rid
of the whole mess by just not creating the lists at all until the point
where we formerly canonicalized them.
There are several ways in which we could implement that without making
query_planner itself deal with grouping/sorting features (which are
supposed to be the province of grouping_planner). I chose to add a
callback function to query_planner's API; other alternatives would have
required adding more fields to PlannerInfo, which while not bad in itself
would create an ABI break for planner-related plugins in the 9.2 release
series. This still breaks ABI for anything that calls query_planner
directly, but it seems somewhat unlikely that there are any such plugins.
I had originally conceived of this change as merely a step on the way to
fixing bug #8049 from Teun Hoogendoorn; but it turns out that this fixes
that bug all by itself, as per the added regression test. The reason is
that now get_eclass_for_sort_expr is adding the ORDER BY expression at the
end of EquivalenceClass creation not the start, and so anything that is in
a multi-member EquivalenceClass has already been created with correct
em_nullable_relids. I am suspicious that there are related scenarios in
which we still need to teach get_eclass_for_sort_expr to compute correct
nullable_relids, but am not eager to risk destabilizing either 9.2 or 9.3
to fix bugs that are only hypothetical. So for the moment, do this and
stop here.
Back-patch to 9.2 but not to earlier branches, since they don't exhibit
this bug for lack of join-clause-movement logic that depends on
em_nullable_relids being correct. (We might have to revisit that choice
if any related bugs turn up.) In 9.2, don't change the signature of
make_pathkeys_for_sortclauses nor remove canonicalize_pathkeys, so as
not to risk more plugin breakage than we have to.
The SQL standard does not have general functions-in-FROM, but it does
allow UNNEST() there (see the <collection derived table> production),
and the semantics of that are defined to include lateral references.
So spec compliance requires allowing lateral references within UNNEST()
even without an explicit LATERAL keyword. Rather than making UNNEST()
a special case, it seems best to extend this flexibility to any
function-in-FROM. We'll still allow LATERAL to be written explicitly
for clarity's sake, but it's now a noise word in this context.
In theory this change could result in a change in behavior of existing
queries, by allowing what had been an outer reference in a function-in-FROM
to be captured by an earlier FROM-item at the same level. However, all
pre-9.3 PG releases have a bug that causes them to match variable
references to earlier FROM-items in preference to outer references (and
then throw an error). So no previously-working query could contain the
type of ambiguity that would risk a change of behavior.
Per a suggestion from Andrew Gierth, though I didn't use his patch.
If a potential equivalence clause references a variable from the nullable
side of an outer join, the planner needs to take care that derived clauses
are not pushed to below the outer join; else they may use the wrong value
for the variable. (The problem arises only with non-strict clauses, since
if an upper clause can be proven strict then the outer join will get
simplified to a plain join.) The planner attempted to prevent this type
of error by checking that potential equivalence clauses aren't
outerjoin-delayed as a whole, but actually we have to check each side
separately, since the two sides of the clause will get moved around
separately if it's treated as an equivalence. Bugs of this type can be
demonstrated as far back as 7.4, even though releases before 8.3 had only
a very ad-hoc notion of equivalence clauses.
In addition, we neglected to account for the possibility that such clauses
might have nonempty nullable_relids even when not outerjoin-delayed; so the
equivalence-class machinery lacked logic to compute correct nullable_relids
values for clauses it constructs. This oversight was harmless before 9.2
because we were only using RestrictInfo.nullable_relids for OR clauses;
but as of 9.2 it could result in pushing constructed equivalence clauses
to incorrect places. (This accounts for bug #7604 from Bill MacArthur.)
Fix the first problem by adding a new test check_equivalence_delay() in
distribute_qual_to_rels, and fix the second one by adding code in
equivclass.c and called functions to set correct nullable_relids for
generated clauses. Although I believe the second part of this is not
currently necessary before 9.2, I chose to back-patch it anyway, partly to
keep the logic similar across branches and partly because it seems possible
we might find other reasons why we need valid values of nullable_relids in
the older branches.
Add regression tests illustrating these problems. In 9.0 and up, also
add test cases checking that we can push constants through outer joins,
since we've broken that optimization before and I nearly broke it again
with an overly simplistic patch for this problem.
Some experimentation with examples similar to bug #7539 has convinced me
that indxpath.c's original implementation of parameterized-path generation
was several bricks shy of a load. In general, if we are relying on a
particular outer rel or set of outer rels for a parameterized path, the
path should use every indexable join clause that's available from that rel
or rels. Any join clauses that get left out of the indexqual will end up
getting applied as plain filter quals (qpquals), and that's generally a
significant loser compared to having the index AM enforce them. (This is
particularly true with btree, which can skip the index scan entirely if
it can see that the given indexquals are mutually contradictory.) The
original heuristics failed to ensure this, though, and were overly
complicated anyway. Rewrite to make the code explicitly identify each
useful set of outer rels and then select all applicable join clauses for
each one. The one plan that changes in the regression tests is in fact
for the better according to the planner's cost estimates.
(Note: this is not a correctness issue but just a matter of plan quality.
I don't yet know what is going on in bug #7539, but I don't expect this
change to fix that.)
We can detect whether the planner top level is going to care at all about
cheap startup cost (it will only do so if query_planner's tuple_fraction
argument is greater than zero). If it isn't, we might as well discard
paths immediately whose only advantage over others is cheap startup cost.
This turns out to get rid of quite a lot of paths in complex queries ---
I saw planner runtime reduction of more than a third on one large query.
Since add_path isn't currently passed the PlannerInfo "root", the easiest
way to tell it whether to do this was to add a bool flag to RelOptInfo.
That's a bit redundant, since all relations in a given query level will
have the same setting. But in the future it's possible that we'd refine
the control decision to work on a per-relation basis, so this seems like
a good arrangement anyway.
Per my suggestion of a few months ago.
If a PlaceHolderVar contains a pulled-up LATERAL reference, its minimum
possible evaluation level might be higher in the join tree than its
original syntactic location. That in turn affects the ph_needed level for
any contained PlaceHolderVars (that is, those PHVs had better propagate up
the join tree at least to the evaluation level of the outer PHV). We got
this mostly right, but mark_placeholder_maybe_needed() failed to account
for the effect, and in consequence could leave the inner PHVs with
ph_may_need less than what their ultimate ph_needed value will be. That's
bad because it could lead to failure to select a join order that will allow
evaluation of the inner PHV at a valid location. Fix that, and add an
Assert that checks that we don't ever set ph_needed to more than
ph_may_need.
This patch takes care of a number of problems having to do with failure
to choose valid join orders and incorrect handling of lateral references
pulled up from subqueries. Notable changes:
* Add a LateralJoinInfo data structure similar to SpecialJoinInfo, to
represent join ordering constraints created by lateral references.
(I first considered extending the SpecialJoinInfo structure, but the
semantics are different enough that a separate data structure seems
better.) Extend join_is_legal() and related functions to prevent trying
to form unworkable joins, and to ensure that we will consider joins that
satisfy lateral references even if the joins would be clauseless.
* Fill in the infrastructure needed for the last few types of relation scan
paths to support parameterization. We'd have wanted this eventually
anyway, but it is necessary now because a relation that gets pulled up out
of a UNION ALL subquery may acquire a reltargetlist containing lateral
references, meaning that its paths *have* to be parameterized whether or
not we have any code that can push join quals down into the scan.
* Compute data about lateral references early in query_planner(), and save
in RelOptInfo nodes, to avoid repetitive calculations later.
* Assorted corner-case bug fixes.
There's probably still some bugs left, but this is a lot closer to being
real than it was before.
Formerly, subquery pullup had no need to examine other entries in the range
table, since they could not contain any references to the subquery being
pulled up. That's no longer true with LATERAL, so now we need to be able
to visit rangetable subexpressions to replace Vars referencing the
pulled-up subquery. Also, this means that extract_lateral_references must
be unsurprised at encountering lateral PlaceHolderVars, since such might be
created when pulling up a subquery that's underneath an outer join with
respect to the lateral reference.
Re-allow subquery pullup for LATERAL subqueries, except when the subquery
is below an outer join and contains lateral references to relations outside
that outer join. If we pull up in such a case, we risk introducing lateral
cross-references into outer joins' ON quals, which is something the code is
entirely unprepared to cope with right now; and I'm not sure it'll ever be
worth coping with.
Support lateral refs in VALUES (this seems to be the only additional path
type that needs such support as a consequence of re-allowing subquery
pullup).
Put in a slightly hacky fix for joinpath.c's refusal to consider
parameterized join paths even when there cannot be any unparameterized
ones. This was causing "could not devise a query plan for the given query"
failures in queries involving more than two FROM items.
Put in an even more hacky fix for distribute_qual_to_rels() being unhappy
with join quals that contain references to rels outside their syntactic
scope; which is to say, disable that test altogether. Need to think about
how to preserve some sort of debugging cross-check here, while not
expending more cycles than befits a debugging cross-check.
The LATERAL marking has to be propagated down to the UNION leaf queries
when we pull them up. Also, fix the formerly stubbed-off
set_append_rel_pathlist(). It does already have enough smarts to cope with
making a parameterized Append path at need; it just has to not assume that
there *must* be an unparameterized path.
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian