The point of a PlaceHolderVar is to allow a non-strict expression to be
evaluated below an outer join, after which its value bubbles up like a Var
and can be forced to NULL when the outer join's semantics require that.
However, there was a serious design oversight in that, namely that we
didn't ensure that there was actually a correct place in the plan tree
to evaluate the placeholder :-(. It may be necessary to delay evaluation
of an outer join to ensure that a placeholder that should be evaluated
below the join can be evaluated there. Per recent bug report from Kirill
Simonov.
Back-patch to 8.4 where the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was introduced.
a lot of strange behaviors that occurred in join cases. We now identify the
"current" row for every joined relation in UPDATE, DELETE, and SELECT FOR
UPDATE/SHARE queries. If an EvalPlanQual recheck is necessary, we jam the
appropriate row into each scan node in the rechecking plan, forcing it to emit
only that one row. The former behavior could rescan the whole of each joined
relation for each recheck, which was terrible for performance, and what's much
worse could result in duplicated output tuples.
Also, the original implementation of EvalPlanQual could not re-use the recheck
execution tree --- it had to go through a full executor init and shutdown for
every row to be tested. To avoid this overhead, I've associated a special
runtime Param with each LockRows or ModifyTable plan node, and arranged to
make every scan node below such a node depend on that Param. Thus, by
signaling a change in that Param, the EPQ machinery can just rescan the
already-built test plan.
This patch also adds a prohibition on set-returning functions in the
targetlist of SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE. This is needed to avoid the
duplicate-output-tuple problem. It seems fairly reasonable since the
other restrictions on SELECT FOR UPDATE are meant to ensure that there
is a unique correspondence between source tuples and result tuples,
which an output SRF destroys as much as anything else does.
reorder a semijoin into or out of the righthand side of another semijoin,
but actually it doesn't work to reorder it into or out of the righthand
side of a left or antijoin, either. Per bug #4906 from Mathieu Fenniak.
This was sloppy thinking on my part. This identity does work:
( A left join B on (Pab) ) semijoin C on (Pac)
==
( A semijoin C on (Pac) ) left join B on (Pab)
but I failed to see that that doesn't mean this does:
( A left join B on (Pab) ) semijoin C on (Pbc)
!=
A left join ( B semijoin C on (Pbc) ) on (Pab)
restrictions specified for semijoins in optimizer/README, to wit that
you can't reassociate outer joins into or out of the RHS of a semijoin.
Per report from Heikki.
can be pushed to the top of the join tree, we update both the relids and
qualscope variables to keep them in sync. This prevents a possible later
failure of an Assert clause, and affects nothing else since qualscope isn't
used later except for that Assert. At the moment the Assert shouldn't be
reachable when we've pushed the qual up; but this is cheap insurance, and
it's more sensible anyway in terms of the overall logic of the routine.
Per analysis of a bug report from Stefan Huehner.
I'm not back-patching this since it's just future-proofing; but if anyone
gets tempted to change check_outerjoin_delay again in the back branches,
this might be needed.
Stefan Kaltenbrunner. The most reasonable behavior (at least for the near
term) seems to be to ignore the PlaceHolderVar and examine its argument
instead. In support of this, change the API of pull_var_clause() to allow
callers to request recursion into PlaceHolderVars. Currently
estimate_num_groups() is the only customer for that behavior, but where
there's one there may be others.
constants through full joins, as in
select * from tenk1 a full join tenk1 b using (unique1)
where unique1 = 42;
which should generate a fairly cheap plan where we apply the constraint
unique1 = 42 in each relation scan. This had been broken by my patch of
2008-06-27, which is now reverted in favor of a more invasive but hopefully
less incorrect approach. That patch was meant to prevent incorrect extraction
of OR'd indexclauses from OR conditions above an outer join. To do that
correctly we need more information than the outerjoin_delay flag can provide,
so add a nullable_relids field to RestrictInfo that records exactly which
relations are nulled by outer joins that are underneath a particular qual
clause. A side benefit is that we can make the test in create_or_index_quals
more specific: it is now smart enough to extract an OR'd indexclause into the
outer side of an outer join, even though it must not do so in the inner side.
The old coding couldn't distinguish these cases so it could not do either.
making pull_up_sublinks() construct a full-blown JoinExpr tree representation
of IN/EXISTS SubLinks that it is able to convert to semi or anti joins.
This makes pull_up_sublinks() a shade more complex, but the gain in semantic
clarity is worth it. I still have more to do in this area to address the
previously-discussed problems, but this commit in itself fixes at least one
bug in HEAD, as shown by added regression test case.
IS NULL condition is rendered redundant by detection of an antijoin.
If we know that a join is an antijoin, then *any* Var coming out of its
righthand side must be NULL, not only the joining column(s). Also,
it's still gonna be null after being passed up through higher joins,
whether they're outer joins or not. I was misled by a faulty analogy
to reduce_outer_joins() in the original coding. But consider
select * from a left join b on a.x = b.y where b.y is null and b.z is null;
The first IS NULL condition justifies deciding that the join is an antijoin
(if the = is strict) and then the second one is just plain redundant.
though it is an inner rather than outer join type. This essentially means
that we don't bother to separate "pushed down" qual conditions from actual
join quals at a semijoin plan node; which is okay because the restrictions of
SQL syntax make it impossible to have a pushed-down qual that references the
inner side of a semijoin. This allows noticeably better optimization of
IN/EXISTS cases than we had before, since the equivalence-class machinery can
now use those quals. Also fix a couple of other mistakes that had essentially
disabled the ability to unique-ify the inner relation and then join it to just
a subset of the left-hand relations. An example case using the regression
database is
select * from tenk1 a, tenk1 b
where (a.unique1,b.unique2) in (select unique1,unique2 from tenk1 c);
which is planned reasonably well by 8.3 and earlier but had been forcing a
cartesian join of a/b in CVS HEAD.
that represent some expression that we desire to compute below the top level
of the plan, and then let that value "bubble up" as though it were a plain
Var (ie, a column value).
The immediate application is to allow sub-selects to be flattened even when
they are below an outer join and have non-nullable output expressions.
Formerly we couldn't flatten because such an expression wouldn't properly
go to NULL when evaluated above the outer join. Now, we wrap it in a
PlaceHolderVar and arrange for the actual evaluation to occur below the outer
join. When the resulting Var bubbles up through the join, it will be set to
NULL if necessary, yielding the correct results. This fixes a planner
limitation that's existed since 7.1.
In future we might want to use this mechanism to re-introduce some form of
Hellerstein's "expensive functions" optimization, ie place the evaluation of
an expensive function at the most suitable point in the plan tree.
level of a JOIN/ON clause, not only at top level of WHERE. (However, we
can't do this in an outer join's ON clause, unless the ANY/EXISTS refers
only to the nullable side of the outer join, so that it can effectively
be pushed down into the nullable side.) Per request from Kevin Grittner.
In passing, fix a bug in the initial implementation of EXISTS pullup:
it would Assert if the EXIST's WHERE clause used a join alias variable.
Since we haven't yet flattened join aliases when this transformation
happens, it's necessary to include join relids in the computed set of
RHS relids.
the old JOIN_IN code, but antijoins are new functionality.) Teach the planner
to convert appropriate EXISTS and NOT EXISTS subqueries into semi and anti
joins respectively. Also, LEFT JOINs with suitable upper-level IS NULL
filters are recognized as being anti joins. Unify the InClauseInfo and
OuterJoinInfo infrastructure into "SpecialJoinInfo". With that change,
it becomes possible to associate a SpecialJoinInfo with every join attempt,
which permits some cleanup of join selectivity estimation. That needs to be
taken much further than this patch does, but the next step is to change the
API for oprjoin selectivity functions, which seems like material for a
separate patch. So for the moment the output size estimates for semi and
especially anti joins are quite bogus.
of any lower outer join, even if it also references the non-nullable side and
so could not get pushed below the outer join anyway. We need this in case
the clause is an OR clause: if it doesn't get marked outerjoin_delayed,
create_or_index_quals() could pull an indexable restriction for the nullable
side out of it, leading to wrong results as demonstrated by today's bug
report from toruvinn. (See added regression test case for an example.)
In principle this has been wrong for quite a while. In practice I don't
think any branch before 8.3 can really show the failure, because
create_or_index_quals() will only pull out indexable conditions, and before
8.3 those were always strict. So though we might have improperly generated
null-extended rows in the outer join, they'd get discarded from the result
anyway. The gating factor that makes the failure visible is that 8.3
considers "col IS NULL" to be indexable. Hence I'm not going to risk
back-patching further than 8.3.
eval_const_expressions needs to be passed the PlannerInfo ("root") structure,
because in some cases we want it to substitute values for Param nodes.
(So "constant" is not so constant as all that ...) This mistake partially
disabled optimization of unnamed extended-Query statements in 8.3: in
particular the LIKE-to-indexscan optimization would never be applied if the
LIKE pattern was passed as a parameter, and constraint exclusion depending
on a parameter value didn't work either.
of poorer planning in 8.3 than 8.2:
1. After pushing a constant across an outer join --- ie, given
"a LEFT JOIN b ON (a.x = b.y) WHERE a.x = 42", we can deduce that b.y is
sort of equal to 42, in the sense that we needn't fetch any b rows where
it isn't 42 --- loop to see if any additional deductions can be made.
Previous releases did that by recursing, but I had mistakenly thought that
this was no longer necessary given the EquivalenceClass machinery.
2. Allow pushing constants across outer join conditions even if the
condition is outerjoin_delayed due to a lower outer join. This is safe
as long as the condition is strict and we re-test it at the upper join.
3. Keep the outer-join clause even if we successfully push a constant
across it. This is *necessary* in the outerjoin_delayed case, but
even in the simple case, it seems better to do this to ensure that the
join search order heuristics will consider the join as reasonable to
make. Mark such a clause as having selectivity 1.0, though, since it's
not going to eliminate very many rows after application of the constant
condition.
4. Tweak have_relevant_eclass_joinclause to report that two relations
are joinable when they have vars that are equated to the same constant.
We won't actually generate any joinclause from such an EquivalenceClass,
but again it seems that in such a case it's a good idea to consider
the join as worth costing out.
5. Fix a bug in select_mergejoin_clauses that was exposed by these
changes: we have to reject candidate mergejoin clauses if either side was
equated to a constant, because we can't construct a canonical pathkey list
for such a clause. This is an implementation restriction that might be
worth fixing someday, but it doesn't seem critical to get it done for 8.3.
neglected to test whether an outer join's join-condition actually refers to
the lower outer join it is looking at. (The comment correctly described what
was supposed to happen, but the code didn't do it...) This often resulted in
adding an unnecessary constraint on the join order of the two outer joins,
which was bad enough. However, it also seems to expose a performance
problem in an older patch (from 15-Feb): once we've decided that there is a
join ordering constraint, we will start trying clauseless joins between every
combination of rels within the constraint, which pointlessly eats up lots of
time and space if there are numerous rels below the outer join. That probably
needs to be revisited :-(. Per gripe from Jakub Ouhrabka.
eval_const_expressions simplifies this to just "WHERE false", but we have
already done pull_up_IN_clauses so the IN join will be done, or at least
planned, anyway. The trouble case comes when the sub-SELECT is itself a join
and we decide to implement the IN by unique-ifying the sub-SELECT outputs:
with no remaining reference to the output Vars in WHERE, we won't have
propagated the Vars up to the upper join point, leading to "variable not found
in subplan target lists" error. Fix by adding an extra scan of in_info_list
and forcing all Vars mentioned therein to be propagated up to the IN join
point. Per bug report from Miroslav Sulc.
sets for outer joins, in the light of bug #3588 and additional thought and
experimentation. The original methodology was fatally flawed for nests of
more than two outer joins: it got the relationships between adjacent joins
right, but didn't always come to the right conclusions about whether a join
could be interchanged with one two or more levels below it. This was largely
caused by a mistaken idea that we should use the min_lefthand + min_righthand
sets of a sub-join as the minimum left or right input set of an upper join
when we conclude that the sub-join can't commute with the upper one. If
there's a still-lower join that the sub-join *can* commute with, this method
led us to think that that one could commute with the topmost join; which it
can't. Another problem (not directly connected to bug #3588) was that
make_outerjoininfo's processing-order-dependent method for enforcing outer
join identity #3 didn't work right: if we decided that join A could safely
commute with lower join B, we dropped all information about sub-joins under B
that join A could perhaps not safely commute with, because we removed B's
entire min_righthand from A's.
To fix, make an explicit computation of all inner join combinations that occur
below an outer join, and add to that the full syntactic relsets of any lower
outer joins that we determine it can't commute with. This method gives much
more direct enforcement of the outer join rearrangement identities, and it
turns out not to cost a lot of additional bookkeeping.
Thanks to Richard Harris for the bug report and test case.
in cases where a sub-SELECT inserts a WHERE clause between two outer joins,
that clause may prevent us from re-ordering the two outer joins. The code
was considering only the joins' own ON-conditions in determining reordering
safety, which is not good enough. Add a "delay_upper_joins" flag to
OuterJoinInfo to flag that we have detected such a clause and higher-level
outer joins shouldn't be permitted to commute with this one. (This might
seem overly coarse, but given the current rules for OJ reordering, it's
sufficient AFAICT.)
The failure case is actually pretty narrow: it needs a WHERE clause within
the RHS of a left join that checks the RHS of a lower left join, but is not
strict for that RHS (else we'd have simplified the lower join to a plain
join). Even then no failure will be manifest unless the planner chooses to
rearrange the join order.
Per bug report from Adam Terrey.
JOIN quals, just like WHERE quals, even if they reference every one of the
join's relations. Now that we can reorder outer and inner joins, it's
possible for such a qual to end up being assigned to an outer join plan node,
and we mustn't have it treated as a join qual rather than a filter qual for
the node. (If it were, the join could produce null-extended rows that it
shouldn't.) Per bug report from Pelle Johansson.
that overlap an outer join's min_righthand but aren't fully contained in it,
to support joining within the RHS after having performed an outer join that
can commute with this one. Aside from the direct fix in make_join_rel(),
fix has_join_restriction() and GEQO's desirable_join() to consider this
possibility. Per report from Ian Harding.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
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.
when collapsing of JOIN trees is stopped by join_collapse_limit. For instance
a list of 11 LEFT JOINs with limit 8 now produces something like
((1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) 9 10 11 12)
instead of
(((1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) (9)) 10 11 12)
The latter structure is really only required for a FULL JOIN.
Noted while studying an example from Shane Ambler.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
rearrangeable outer joins and the WHERE clause is non-strict and mentions
only nullable-side relations. New bug in 8.2, caused by new logic to allow
rearranging outer joins. Per bug #2807 from Ross Cohen; thanks to Jeff
Davis for producing a usable test case.
tables in the query compete for cache space, not just the one we are
currently costing an indexscan for. This seems more realistic, and it
definitely will help in examples recently exhibited by Stefan
Kaltenbrunner. To get the total size of all the tables involved, we must
tweak the handling of 'append relations' a bit --- formerly we looked up
information about the child tables on-the-fly during set_append_rel_pathlist,
but it needs to be done before we start doing any cost estimation, so
push it into the add_base_rels_to_query scan.
to a relation on the nullable side of an outer join. I had removed
this during the outer join planning rewrite a few months ago ... I think
I intended to put it somewhere else, but forgot ...
clauses containing no variables and no volatile functions. Such a clause
can be used as a one-time qual in a gating Result plan node, to suppress
plan execution entirely when it is false. Even when the clause is true,
putting it in a gating node wins by avoiding repeated evaluation of the
clause. In previous PG releases, query_planner() would do this for
pseudoconstant clauses appearing at the top level of the jointree, but
there was no ability to generate a gating Result deeper in the plan tree.
To fix it, get rid of the special case in query_planner(), and instead
process pseudoconstant clauses through the normal RestrictInfo qual
distribution mechanism. When a pseudoconstant clause is found attached to
a path node in create_plan(), pull it out and generate a gating Result at
that point. This requires special-casing pseudoconstants in selectivity
estimation and cost_qual_eval, but on the whole it's pretty clean.
It probably even makes the planner a bit faster than before for the normal
case of no pseudoconstants, since removing pull_constant_clauses saves one
useless traversal of the qual tree. Per gripe from Phil Frost.
during parse analysis, not only errors detected in the flex/bison stages.
This is per my earlier proposal. This commit includes all the basic
infrastructure, but locations are only tracked and reported for errors
involving column references, function calls, and operators. More could
be done later but this seems like a good set to start with. I've also
moved the ReportSyntaxErrorPosition logic out of psql and into libpq,
which should make it available to more people --- even within psql this
is an improvement because warnings weren't handled by ReportSyntaxErrorPosition.
not likely ever to be implemented seeing it's been removed from SQL2003.
This allows getting rid of the 'filter' version of yylex() that we had in
parser.c, which should save at least a few microseconds in parsing.
inheritance trees on-the-fly, which pretty well constrained us to considering
only one way of planning inheritance, expand inheritance sets during the
planner prep phase, and build a side data structure that can be consulted
later to find which RTEs are members of which inheritance sets. As proof of
concept, use the data structure to plan joins against inheritance sets more
efficiently: we can now use indexes on the set members in inner-indexscan
joins. (The generated plans could be improved further, but it'll take some
executor changes.) This data structure will also support handling UNION ALL
subqueries in the same way as inheritance sets, but that aspect of it isn't
finished yet.
Per my recent proposal. I ended up basing the implementation on the
existing mechanism for enforcing valid join orders of IN joins --- the
rules for valid outer-join orders are somewhat similar.
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.
sense and rename to "outerjoin_delayed" to more clearly reflect what it
means). I had decided that it was redundant in 8.1, but the folly of this
is exposed by a bug report from Sebastian Böck. The place where it's
needed is to prevent orindxpath.c from cherry-picking arms of an outer-join
OR clause to form a relation restriction that isn't actually legal to push
down to the relation scan level. There may be some legal cases that this
forbids optimizing, but we'd need much closer analysis to determine it.
only the inner-side relation would be considered as potential equijoin clauses,
which is wrong because the condition doesn't necessarily hold above the point
of the outer join. Per test case from Kevin Grittner (bug#1916).
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.
to eliminate unnecessary deadlocks. This commit adds SELECT ... FOR SHARE
paralleling SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. The implementation uses a new SLRU
data structure (managed much like pg_subtrans) to represent multiple-
transaction-ID sets. When more than one transaction is holding a shared
lock on a particular row, we create a MultiXactId representing that set
of transactions and store its ID in the row's XMAX. This scheme allows
an effectively unlimited number of row locks, just as we did before,
while not costing any extra overhead except when a shared lock actually
has to be shared. Still TODO: use the regular lock manager to control
the grant order when multiple backends are waiting for a row lock.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
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 ...
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.
join conditions in which each OR subclause includes a constraint on
the same relation. This implements the other useful side-effect of
conversion to CNF format, without its unpleasant side-effects. As
per pghackers discussion of a few weeks ago.
teaching the latter to accept either RestrictInfo nodes or bare
clause expressions; and cache the selectivity result in the RestrictInfo
node when possible. This extends the caching behavior of approx_selectivity
to many more contexts, and should reduce duplicate selectivity
calculations.
first time generate an OR indexscan for a two-column index when the WHERE
condition is like 'col1 = foo AND (col2 = bar OR col2 = baz)' --- before,
the OR had to be on the first column of the index or we'd not notice the
possibility of using it. Some progress towards extracting OR indexscans
from subclauses of an OR that references multiple relations, too, although
this code is #ifdef'd out because it needs more work.
fields: now they are valid whenever the clause is a binary opclause,
not only when it is a potential join clause (there is a new boolean
field canjoin to signal the latter condition). This lets us avoid
recomputing the relid sets over and over while examining indexes.
Still more work to do to make this as useful as it could be, because
there are places that could use the info but don't have access to the
RestrictInfo node.
regression=# select 1 from tenk1 ta cross join tenk1 tb for update;
ERROR: no relation entry for relid 3
7.3 said "SELECT FOR UPDATE cannot be applied to a join", which was better
but still wrong, considering that 7.2 took the query just fine. Fix by
making transformForUpdate() ignore JOIN and other special RTE types,
rather than trying to mark them FOR UPDATE. The actual error message now
only appears if you explicitly name the join in FOR UPDATE.
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.
the join, per recent discussion on pgsql-sql. Not clear that this will
come up often in real queries, but it's not any more expensive to do it
right, so we may as well do it right.
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.
There are two implementation techniques: the executor understands a new
JOIN_IN jointype, which emits at most one matching row per left-hand row,
or the result of the IN's sub-select can be fed through a DISTINCT filter
and then joined as an ordinary relation.
Along the way, some minor code cleanup in the optimizer; notably, break
out most of the jointree-rearrangement preprocessing in planner.c and
put it in a new file prep/prepjointree.c.
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.
costs for expression evaluation, not only per-tuple cost as before.
This extension is needed in order to deal realistically with hashed or
materialized sub-selects.
so that all executable expression nodes inherit from a common supertype
Expr. This is somewhat of an exercise in code purity rather than any
real functional advance, but getting rid of the extra Oper or Func node
formerly used in each operator or function call should provide at least
a little space and speed improvement.
initdb forced by changes in stored-rules representation.
joinclauses is determined accurately for each join. Formerly, the code only
considered joinclauses that used all of the rels from the outer side of the
join; thus for example
FROM (a CROSS JOIN b) JOIN c ON (c.f1 = a.x AND c.f2 = b.y)
could not exploit a two-column index on c(f1,f2), since neither of the
qual clauses would be in the joininfo list it looked in. The new code does
this correctly, and also is able to eliminate redundant clauses, thus fixing
the problem noted 24-Oct-02 by Hans-Jürgen Schönig.
of groups produced by GROUP BY. This improves the accuracy of planning
estimates for grouped subselects, and is needed to check whether a
hashed aggregation plan risks memory overflow.
rather than a Query node; this allows set_plan_references to recurse
into subplans correctly. Fixes core dump on full outer joins in
subplans. Also, invoke preprocess_expression on function RTEs'
function expressions. This seems to fix the planner's problems with
outer-level Vars in function RTEs.
returns-set boolean field in Func and Oper nodes. This allows cleaner,
more reliable tests for expressions returning sets in the planner and
parser. For example, a WHERE clause returning a set is now detected
and complained of in the parser, not only at runtime.
lists to join RTEs, attach a list of Vars and COALESCE expressions that will
replace the join's alias variables during planning. This simplifies
flatten_join_alias_vars while still making it easy to fix up varno references
when transforming the query tree. Add regression test cases for interactions
of subqueries with outer joins.
qualified operator names directly, for example CREATE OPERATOR myschema.+
( ... ). To qualify an operator name in an expression you need to write
OPERATOR(myschema.+) (thanks to Peter for suggesting an escape hatch).
I also took advantage of having to reformat pg_operator to fix something
that'd been bugging me for a while: mergejoinable operators should have
explicit links to the associated cross-data-type comparison operators,
rather than hardwiring an assumption that they are named < and >.
now has an RTE of its own, and references to its outputs now are Vars
referencing the JOIN RTE, rather than CASE-expressions. This allows
reverse-listing in ruleutils.c to use the correct alias easily, rather
than painfully reverse-engineering the alias namespace as it used to do.
Also, nested FULL JOINs work correctly, because the result of the inner
joins are simple Vars that the planner can cope with. This fixes a bug
reported a couple times now, notably by Tatsuo on 18-Nov-01. The alias
Vars are expanded into COALESCE expressions where needed at the very end
of planning, rather than during parsing.
Also, beginnings of support for showing plan qualifier expressions in
EXPLAIN. There are probably still cases that need work.
initdb forced due to change of stored-rule representation.
clause being added to a particular restriction-clause list is redundant
with those already in the list. This avoids useless work at runtime,
and (perhaps more importantly) keeps the selectivity estimation routines
from generating too-small estimates of numbers of output rows.
Also some minor improvements in OPTIMIZER_DEBUG displays.
of costsize.c routines to pass Query root, so that costsize can figure
more things out by itself and not be so dependent on its callers to tell
it everything it needs to know. Use selectivity of hash or merge clause
to estimate number of tuples processed internally in these joins
(this is more useful than it would've been before, since eqjoinsel is
somewhat more accurate than before).
create_index_paths are not immediately discarded, but are available for
subsequent planner work. This allows avoiding redundant syscache lookups
in several places. Change interface to operator selectivity estimation
procedures to allow faster and more flexible estimation.
Initdb forced due to change of pg_proc entries for selectivity functions!
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
to specific base or join RelOptInfo nodes during planning. This preserves
the more-intuitive behavior of 7.0.* --- if you write an expensive clause
(such as a sub-select) last, it should get evaluated last. Someday we
ought to try to have some intelligence about the order of evaluation of
WHERE clauses, but for now we should not override what the user wrote.
1. If there is exactly one pg_operator entry of the right name and oprkind,
oper() and related routines would return that entry whether its input type
had anything to do with the request or not. This is just premature
optimization: we shouldn't return the single candidate until after we verify
that it really is a valid candidate, ie, is at least coercion-compatible
with the given types.
2. oper() and related routines only promise a coercion-compatible result.
Unfortunately, there were quite a few callers that assumed the returned
operator is binary-compatible with the given datatype; they would proceed
to call it without making any datatype coercions. These callers include
sorting, grouping, aggregation, and VACUUM ANALYZE. In general I think
it is appropriate for these callers to require an exact or binary-compatible
match, so I've added a new routine compatible_oper() that only succeeds if
it can find an operator that doesn't require any run-time conversions.
Callers now call oper() or compatible_oper() depending on whether they are
prepared to deal with type conversion or not.
The upshot of these bugs is revealed by the following silliness in PL/Tcl's
selftest: it creates an operator @< on int4, and then tries to use it to
sort a char(N) column. The system would let it do that :-( (and evidently
has done so since 6.3 :-( :-(). The result in this case was just a silly
sort order, but the reverse combination would've provoked coredump from
trying to dereference integers. With this fix you get more reasonable
behavior:
pltcl_test=# select * from T_pkey1 order by key1, key2 using @<;
ERROR: Unable to identify an operator '@<' for types 'bpchar' and 'bpchar'
You will have to retype this query using an explicit cast
comparison does not consider paths different when they differ only in
uninteresting aspects of sort order. (We had a special case of this
consideration for indexscans already, but generalize it to apply to
ordered join paths too.) Be stricter about what is a canonical pathkey
to allow faster pathkey comparison. Cache canonical pathkeys and
dispersion stats for left and right sides of a RestrictInfo's clause,
to avoid repeated computation. Total speedup will depend on number of
tables in a query, but I see about 4x speedup of planning phase for
a sample seven-table query.
avoid repeated evaluations in cost_qual_eval(). This turns out to save
a useful fraction of planning time. No change to external representation
of RestrictInfo --- although that node type doesn't appear in stored
rules anyway.
maintained for each cache entry. A cache entry will not be freed until
the matching ReleaseSysCache call has been executed. This eliminates
worries about cache entries getting dropped while still in use. See
my posting to pg-hackers of even date for more info.
(Don't forget that an alias is required.) Views reimplemented as expanding
to subselect-in-FROM. Grouping, aggregates, DISTINCT in views actually
work now (he says optimistically). No UNION support in subselects/views
yet, but I have some ideas about that. Rule-related permissions checking
moved out of rewriter and into executor.
INITDB REQUIRED!
right thing with variable-free clauses that contain noncachable functions,
such as 'WHERE random() < 0.5' --- these are evaluated once per
potential output tuple. Expressions that contain only Params are
now candidates to be indexscan quals --- for example, 'var = ($1 + 1)'
can now be indexed. Cope with RelabelType nodes atop potential indexscan
variables --- this oversight prevents 7.0.* from recognizing some
potentially indexscanable situations.
from Param nodes, per discussion a few days ago on pghackers. Add new
expression node type FieldSelect that implements the functionality where
it's actually needed. Clean up some other unused fields in Func nodes
as well.
NOTE: initdb forced due to change in stored expression trees for rules.
mergejoinable qual clauses, and add them to the query quals. For
example, WHERE a = b AND b = c will cause us to add AND a = c.
This is necessary to ensure that it's safe to use these variables
as interchangeable sort keys, which is something 7.0 knows how to do.
Should provide a useful improvement in planning ability, too.
accesses versus sequential accesses, a (very crude) estimate of the
effects of caching on random page accesses, and cost to evaluate WHERE-
clause expressions. Export critical parameters for this model as SET
variables. Also, create SET variables for the planner's enable flags
(enable_seqscan, enable_indexscan, etc) so that these can be controlled
more conveniently than via PGOPTIONS.
Planner now estimates both startup cost (cost before retrieving
first tuple) and total cost of each path, so it can optimize queries
with LIMIT on a reasonable basis by interpolating between these costs.
Same facility is a win for EXISTS(...) subqueries and some other cases.
Redesign pathkey representation to achieve a major speedup in planning
(I saw as much as 5X on a 10-way join); also minor changes in planner
to reduce memory consumption by recycling discarded Path nodes and
not constructing unnecessary lists.
Minor cleanups to display more-plausible costs in some cases in
EXPLAIN output.
Initdb forced by change in interface to index cost estimation
functions.
fields in JoinPaths --- turns out that we do need that after all :-(.
Also, rearrange planner so that only one RelOptInfo is created for a
particular set of joined base relations, no matter how many different
subsets of relations it can be created from. This saves memory and
processing time compared to the old method of making a bunch of RelOptInfos
and then removing the duplicates. Clean up the jointree iteration logic;
not sure if it's better, but I sure find it more readable and plausible
now, particularly for the case of 'bushy plans'.
pghackers discussion of 5-Jan-2000. The amopselect and amopnpages
estimators are gone, and in their place is a per-AM amcostestimate
procedure (linked to from pg_am, not pg_amop).
mentioned in FROM but not elsewhere in the query: such tables should be
joined over anyway. Aside from being more standards-compliant, this allows
removal of some very ugly hacks for COUNT(*) processing. Also, allow
HAVING clause without aggregate functions, since SQL does. Clean up
CREATE RULE statement-list syntax the same way Bruce just fixed the
main stmtmulti production.
CAUTION: addition of a field to RangeTblEntry nodes breaks stored rules;
you will have to initdb if you have any rules.
Most parts of the planner should ignore, or indeed never even see, uplevel
Vars because they will be or have been replaced by Params. There were a
couple of places that got it wrong though, probably my fault from recent
changes...
and fix_opids processing to a single recursive pass over the plan tree
executed at the very tail end of planning, rather than haphazardly here
and there at different places. Now that tlist Vars do not get modified
until the very end, it's possible to get rid of the klugy var_equal and
match_varid partial-matching routines, and just use plain equal()
throughout the optimizer. This is a step towards allowing merge and
hash joins to be done on expressions instead of only Vars ...
store all ordering information in pathkeys lists (which are now lists of
lists of PathKeyItem nodes, not just lists of lists of vars). This was
a big win --- the code is smaller and IMHO more understandable than it
was, even though it handles more cases. I believe the node changes will
not force an initdb for anyone; planner nodes don't show up in stored
rules.
identified by Hiroshi (incorrect cost attributed to OR clauses
after multiple passes through set_rest_selec()). I think the code
was trying to allow selectivities of OR subclauses to be passed in
from outside, but noplace was actually passing any useful data, and
set_rest_selec() was passing wrong data.
Restructure representation of "indexqual" in IndexPath nodes so that
it is the same as for indxqual in completed IndexScan nodes: namely,
a toplevel list with an entry for each pass of the index scan, having
sublists that are implicitly-ANDed index qual conditions for that pass.
You don't want to know what the old representation was :-(
Improve documentation of OR-clause indexscan functions.
Remove useless 'notclause' field from RestrictInfo nodes. (This might
force an initdb for anyone who has stored rules containing RestrictInfos,
but I do not think that RestrictInfo ever appears in completed plans.)
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway
Peter Eisentraut