query_tree_walker and query_tree_mutator were skipping the
windowClause of the query, without regard for the fact that the
startOffset and endOffset in a WindowClause node are expression trees
that need to be processed. This was an oversight in commit ec4be2ee6
from 2010 which added the expression fields; the main symptom is that
function parameters in window frame clauses don't work in inlined
functions.
Fix (as conservatively as possible since this needs to not break
existing out-of-tree callers) and add tests.
Backpatch all the way, since this has been broken since 9.0.
Per report from Alastair McKinley; fix by me with kibitzing and review
from Tom Lane.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/DB6PR0202MB2904E7FDDA9D81504D1E8C68E3800@DB6PR0202MB2904.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com
By sorting the active window list lexicographically by the sort clause
list but putting longer clauses before shorter prefixes, we generate
more chances to elide Sort nodes when building the path.
Author: Daniel Gustafsson (with some editorialization by me)
Reviewed-by: Alexander Kuzmenkov, Masahiko Sawada, Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/124A7F69-84CD-435B-BA0E-2695BE21E5C2%40yesql.se
nodeWindowAgg.c failed to cope with the possibility that no ordering
columns are defined in the window frame for GROUPS mode or RANGE OFFSET
mode, leading to assertion failures or odd errors, as reported by Masahiko
Sawada and Lukas Eder. In RANGE OFFSET mode, an ordering column is really
required, so add an Assert about that. In GROUPS mode, the code would
work, except that the node initialization code wasn't in sync with the
execution code about when to set up tuplestore read pointers and spare
slots. Fix the latter for consistency's sake (even though I think the
changes described below make the out-of-sync cases unreachable for now).
Per SQL spec, a single ordering column is required for RANGE OFFSET mode,
and at least one ordering column is required for GROUPS mode. The parser
enforced the former but not the latter; add a check for that.
We were able to reach the no-ordering-column cases even with fully spec
compliant queries, though, because the planner would drop partitioning
and ordering columns from the generated plan if they were redundant with
earlier columns according to the redundant-pathkey logic, for instance
"PARTITION BY x ORDER BY y" in the presence of a "WHERE x=y" qual.
While in principle that's an optimization that could save some pointless
comparisons at runtime, it seems unlikely to be meaningful in the real
world. I think this behavior was not so much an intentional optimization
as a side-effect of an ancient decision to construct the plan node's
ordering-column info by reverse-engineering the PathKeys of the input
path. If we give up redundant-column removal then it takes very little
code to generate the plan node info directly from the WindowClause,
ensuring that we have the expected number of ordering columns in all
cases. (If anyone does complain about this, the planner could perhaps
be taught to remove redundant columns only when it's safe to do so,
ie *not* in RANGE OFFSET mode. But I doubt anyone ever will.)
With these changes, the WindowAggPath.winpathkeys field is not used for
anything anymore, so remove it.
The test cases added here are not actually very interesting given the
removal of the redundant-column-removal logic, but they would represent
important corner cases if anyone ever tries to put that back.
Tom Lane and Masahiko Sawada. Back-patch to v11 where RANGE OFFSET
and GROUPS modes were added.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAD21AoDrWqycq-w_+Bx1cjc+YUhZ11XTj9rfxNiNDojjBx8Fjw@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153086788677.17476.8002640580496698831@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Commit 0a459cec9 left this for later, but since time's running out,
I went ahead and took care of it. There are more data types that
somebody might someday want RANGE support for, but this is enough
to satisfy all expectations of the SQL standard, which just says that
"numeric, datetime, and interval" types should have RANGE support.
This patch adds the ability to use "RANGE offset PRECEDING/FOLLOWING"
frame boundaries in window functions. We'd punted on that back in the
original patch to add window functions, because it was not clear how to
do it in a reasonably data-type-extensible fashion. That problem is
resolved here by adding the ability for btree operator classes to provide
an "in_range" support function that defines how to add or subtract the
RANGE offset value. Factoring it this way also allows the operator class
to avoid overflow problems near the ends of the datatype's range, if it
wishes to expend effort on that. (In the committed patch, the integer
opclasses handle that issue, but it did not seem worth the trouble to
avoid overflow failures for datetime types.)
The patch includes in_range support for the integer_ops opfamily
(int2/int4/int8) as well as the standard datetime types. Support for
other numeric types has been requested, but that seems like suitable
material for a follow-on patch.
In addition, the patch adds GROUPS mode which counts the offset in
ORDER-BY peer groups rather than rows, and it adds the frame_exclusion
options specified by SQL:2011. As far as I can see, we are now fully
up to spec on window framing options.
Existing behaviors remain unchanged, except that I changed the errcode
for a couple of existing error reports to meet the SQL spec's expectation
that negative "offset" values should be reported as SQLSTATE 22013.
Internally and in relevant parts of the documentation, we now consistently
use the terminology "offset PRECEDING/FOLLOWING" rather than "value
PRECEDING/FOLLOWING", since the term "value" is confusingly vague.
Oliver Ford, reviewed and whacked around some by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAGMVOdu9sivPAxbNN0X+q19Sfv9edEPv=HibOJhB14TJv_RCQg@mail.gmail.com
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.
Andrew Gierth
Tom Lane
Noah Misch
Peter Eisentraut