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.
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.
until vars are distributed to rels during query_planner() startup. We don't
really need it before that, and not building it early has some advantages.
First, we don't need to put it through the various preprocessing steps, which
saves some cycles and eliminates the need for a number of routines to support
PlaceHolderInfo nodes at all. Second, this means one less unused plan for any
sub-SELECT appearing in a placeholder's expression, since we don't build
placeholder_list until after sublink expansion is complete.
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.
