We can allow this even without any specific knowledge of the semantics
of the window function, so long as pushed-down quals will either accept
every row in a given window partition, or reject every such row. Because
window functions act only within a partition, such a case can't result
in changing the window functions' outputs for any surviving row.
Eliminating entire partitions in this way obviously can reduce the cost
of the window-function computations substantially.
The fly in the ointment is that it's hard to be entirely sure whether
this is true for an arbitrary qual condition. This patch allows pushdown
if (a) the qual references only partitioning columns, and (b) the qual
contains no volatile functions. We are at risk of incorrect results if
the qual can produce different answers for values that the partitioning
equality operator sees as equal. While it's not hard to invent cases
for which that can happen, it seems to seldom be a problem in practice,
since no one has complained about a similar assumption that we've had
for many years with respect to DISTINCT. The potential performance
gains seem to be worth the risk.
David Rowley, reviewed by Vik Fearing; some credit is due also to
Thomas Mayer who did considerable preliminary investigation.
First installment of the promised moving-aggregate support in built-in
aggregates: count(), sum(), avg(), stddev() and variance() for
assorted datatypes, though not for float4/float8.
In passing, remove a 2001-vintage kluge in interval_accum(): interval
array elements have been properly aligned since around 2003, but
nobody remembered to take out this workaround. Also, fix a thinko
in the opr_sanity tests for moving-aggregate catalog entries.
David Rowley and Florian Pflug, reviewed by Dean Rasheed
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
These things didn't work because the planner omitted to do the necessary
preprocessing of a WindowFunc's argument list. Add the few dozen lines
of code needed to handle that.
Although this sounds like a feature addition, it's really a bug fix because
the default-argument case was likely to crash previously, due to lack of
checking of the number of supplied arguments in the built-in window
functions. It's not a security issue because there's no way for a
non-superuser to create a window function definition with defaults that
refers to a built-in C function, but nonetheless people might be annoyed
that it crashes rather than producing a useful error message. So
back-patch as far as the patch applies easily, which turns out to be 9.2.
I'll put a band-aid in earlier versions as a separate patch.
(Note that these features still don't work for aggregates, and fixing that
case will be harder since we represent aggregate arg lists as target lists
not bare expression lists. There's no crash risk though because CREATE
AGGREGATE doesn't accept defaults, and we reject named-argument notation
when parsing an aggregate call.)
This is SQL-standard with a few extensions, namely support for
subqueries and outer references in clause expressions.
catversion bump due to change in Aggref and WindowFunc.
David Fetter, reviewed by Dean Rasheed.
In commit 1bc16a9460 I added a minor
optimization to drop the component variables of a GROUP BY expression from
the target list computed at the aggregation level of a query, if those Vars
weren't referenced elsewhere in the tlist. However, I overlooked that the
window-function planning code would deconstruct such expressions and thus
need to have access to their component variables. Fix it to not do that.
While at it, I removed the distinction between volatile and nonvolatile
window partition/order expressions: the code now computes all of them
at the aggregation level. This saves a relatively expensive check for
volatility, and it's unclear that the resulting plan isn't better anyway.
Per bug #7535 from Louis-David Mitterrand. Back-patch to 9.2.
Add a column pg_class.relallvisible to remember the number of pages that
were all-visible according to the visibility map as of the last VACUUM
(or ANALYZE, or some other operations that update pg_class.relpages).
Use relallvisible/relpages, instead of an arbitrary constant, to estimate
how many heap page fetches can be avoided during an index-only scan.
This is pretty primitive and will no doubt see refinements once we've
acquired more field experience with the index-only scan mechanism, but
it's way better than using a constant.
Note: I had to adjust an underspecified query in the window.sql regression
test, because it was changing answers when the plan changed to use an
index-only scan. Some of the adjacent tests perhaps should be adjusted
as well, but I didn't do that here.
In commit c1d9579dd8, I changed things so
that the output of the Agg node that feeds the window functions would not
list any ungrouped Vars directly. Formerly, for example, the Agg tlist
might have included both "x" and "sum(x)", which is not really valid if
"x" isn't a grouping column. If we then had a window function ordering on
something like "sum(x) + 1", prepare_sort_from_pathkeys would find no exact
match for this in the Agg tlist, and would conclude that it must recompute
the expression. But it would break the expression down to just the Var
"x", which it would find in the tlist, and then rebuild the ORDER BY
expression using a reference to the subplan's "x" output. Now, after the
above-referenced changes, "x" isn't in the Agg tlist if it's not a grouping
column, so that prepare_sort_from_pathkeys fails with "could not find
pathkey item to sort", as reported by Bricklen Anderson.
The fix is to not break down Aggrefs into their component parts, but just
treat them as irreducible expressions to be sought in the subplan tlist.
This is definitely OK for the use with respect to window functions in
grouping_planner, since it just built the tlist being used on the same
basis. AFAICT it is safe for other uses too; most of the other call sites
couldn't encounter Aggrefs anyway.
Regular aggregate functions in combination with, or within the arguments
of, window functions are OK per spec; they have the semantics that the
aggregate output rows are computed and then we run the window functions
over that row set. (Thus, this combination is not really useful unless
there's a GROUP BY so that more than one aggregate output row is possible.)
The case without GROUP BY could fail, as recently reported by Jeff Davis,
because sloppy construction of the Agg node's targetlist resulted in extra
references to possibly-ungrouped Vars appearing outside the aggregate
function calls themselves. See the added regression test case for an
example.
Fixing this requires modifying the API of flatten_tlist and its underlying
function pull_var_clause. I chose to make pull_var_clause's API for
aggregates identical to what it was already doing for placeholders, since
the useful behaviors turn out to be the same (error, report node as-is, or
recurse into it). I also tightened the error checking in this area a bit:
if it was ever valid to see an uplevel Var, Aggref, or PlaceHolderVar here,
that was a long time ago, so complain instead of ignoring them.
Backpatch into 9.1. The failure exists in 8.4 and 9.0 as well, but seeing
that it only occurs in a basically-useless corner case, it doesn't seem
worth the risks of changing a function API in a minor release. There might
be third-party code using pull_var_clause.
This patch allows the frame to start from CURRENT ROW (in either RANGE or
ROWS mode), and it also adds support for ROWS n PRECEDING and ROWS n FOLLOWING
start and end points. (RANGE value PRECEDING/FOLLOWING isn't there yet ---
the grammar works, but that's all.)
Hitoshi Harada, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
so that their elements are always taken as simple expressions over the
query's input columns. It originally seemed like a good idea to make them
act exactly like GROUP BY and ORDER BY, right down to the SQL92-era behavior
of accepting output column names or numbers. However, that was not such a
great idea, for two reasons:
1. It permits circular references, as exhibited in bug #5018: the output
column could be the one containing the window function itself. (We actually
had a regression test case illustrating this, but nobody thought twice about
how confusing that would be.)
2. It doesn't seem like a good idea for, eg, "lead(foo) OVER (ORDER BY foo)"
to potentially use two completely different meanings for "foo".
Accordingly, narrow down the behavior of window clauses to use only the
SQL99-compliant interpretation that the expressions are simple expressions.
patch. This includes the ability to force the frame to cover the whole
partition, and the ability to make the frame end exactly on the current row
rather than its last ORDER BY peer. Supporting any more of the full SQL
frame-clause syntax will require nontrivial hacking on the window aggregate
code, so it'll have to wait for 8.5 or beyond.
Tom Lane
Noah Misch
Peter Eisentraut