If we make the initially-called function return the table physical-size
estimate, acquire_inherited_sample_rows will be able to use that to
allocate numbers of samples among child tables, when the day comes that
we want to support foreign tables in inheritance trees.
ANALYZE now accepts foreign tables and allows the table's FDW to control
how the sample rows are collected. (But only manual ANALYZEs will touch
foreign tables, for the moment, since among other things it's not very
clear how to handle remote permissions checks in an auto-analyze.)
contrib/file_fdw is extended to support this.
Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, some further tweaking by me.
Further reflection shows that a single callback isn't very workable if we
desire to let FDWs generate multiple Paths, because that forces the FDW to
do all work necessary to generate a valid Plan node for each Path. Instead
split the former PlanForeignScan API into three steps: GetForeignRelSize,
GetForeignPaths, GetForeignPlan. We had already bit the bullet of breaking
the 9.1 FDW API for 9.2, so this shouldn't cause very much additional pain,
and it's substantially more flexible for complex FDWs.
Add an fdw_private field to RelOptInfo so that the new functions can save
state there rather than possibly having to recalculate information two or
three times.
In addition, we'd not thought through what would be needed to allow an FDW
to set up subexpressions of its choice for runtime execution. We could
treat ForeignScan.fdw_private as an executable expression but that seems
likely to break existing FDWs unnecessarily (in particular, it would
restrict the set of node types allowable in fdw_private to those supported
by expression_tree_walker). Instead, invent a separate field fdw_exprs
which will receive the postprocessing appropriate for expression trees.
(One field is enough since it can be a list of expressions; also, we assume
the corresponding expression state tree(s) will be held within fdw_state,
so we don't need to add anything to ForeignScanState.)
Per review of Hanada Shigeru's pgsql_fdw patch. We may need to tweak this
further as we continue to work on that patch, but to me it feels a lot
closer to being right now.
The original API specification only allowed an FDW to create a single
access path, which doesn't seem like a terribly good idea in hindsight.
Instead, move the responsibility for building the Path node and calling
add_path() into the FDW's PlanForeignScan function. Now, it can do that
more than once if appropriate. There is no longer any need for the
transient FdwPlan struct, so get rid of that.
Etsuro Fujita, Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane