Create a new header optimizer/optimizer.h, which exposes just the
planner functions that can be used "at arm's length", without need
to access Paths or the other planner-internal data structures defined
in nodes/relation.h. This is intended to provide the whole planner
API seen by most of the rest of the system; although FDWs still need
to use additional stuff, and more thought is also needed about just
what selfuncs.c should rely on.
The main point of doing this now is to limit the amount of new
#include baggage that will be needed by "planner support functions",
which I expect to introduce later, and which will be in relevant
datatype modules rather than anywhere near the planner.
This commit just moves relevant declarations into optimizer.h from
other header files (a couple of which go away because everything
got moved), and adjusts #include lists to match. There's further
cleanup that could be done if we want to decide that some stuff
being exposed by optimizer.h doesn't belong in the planner at all,
but I'll leave that for another day.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11460.1548706639@sss.pgh.pa.us
The fact that "SELECT expression" has no base relations has long been a
thorn in the side of the planner. It makes it hard to flatten a sub-query
that looks like that, or is a trivial VALUES() item, because the planner
generally uses relid sets to identify sub-relations, and such a sub-query
would have an empty relid set if we flattened it. prepjointree.c contains
some baroque logic that works around this in certain special cases --- but
there is a much better answer. We can replace an empty FROM clause with a
dummy RTE that acts like a table of one row and no columns, and then there
are no such corner cases to worry about. Instead we need some logic to
get rid of useless dummy RTEs, but that's simpler and covers more cases
than what was there before.
For really trivial cases, where the query is just "SELECT expression" and
nothing else, there's a hazard that adding the extra RTE makes for a
noticeable slowdown; even though it's not much processing, there's not
that much for the planner to do overall. However testing says that the
penalty is very small, close to the noise level. In more complex queries,
this is able to find optimizations that we could not find before.
The new RTE type is called RTE_RESULT, since the "scan" plan type it
gives rise to is a Result node (the same plan we produced for a "SELECT
expression" query before). To avoid confusion, rename the old ResultPath
path type to GroupResultPath, reflecting that it's only used in degenerate
grouping cases where we know the query produces just one grouped row.
(It wouldn't work to unify the two cases, because there are different
rules about where the associated quals live during query_planner.)
Note: although this touches readfuncs.c, I don't think a catversion
bump is required, because the added case can't occur in stored rules,
only plans.
Patch by me, reviewed by David Rowley and Mark Dilger
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15944.1521127664@sss.pgh.pa.us
This commit moves expand_inherited_tables and underlings from
optimizer/prep/prepunionc.c to optimizer/utils/inherit.c.
Also, all of the AppendRelInfo-based expression manipulation routines
are moved to optimizer/utils/appendinfo.c.
No functional code changes. One exception is the introduction of
make_append_rel_info, but that's still just moving around code.
Also, stop including <limits.h> in prepunion.c, which no longer needs
it since 3fc6e2d7f5. I (Álvaro) noticed this because Amit was copying
that to inherit.c, which likewise doesn't need it.
Author: Amit Langote
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3be67028-a00a-502c-199a-da00eec8fb6e@lab.ntt.co.jp
The planner doesn't make any use of root->total_table_pages until it
estimates costs of indexscans, so we don't need to compute it as
early as that's currently done. By doing the calculation between
set_base_rel_sizes and set_base_rel_pathlists, we can omit relations
that get removed from the query by partition pruning or constraint
exclusion, which seems like a more accurate basis for costing.
(Historical note: I think at the time this code was written, there
was not a separation between the "set sizes" and "set pathlists"
steps, so that this approach would have been impossible at the time.
But now that we have that separation, this is clearly the better way
to do things.)
David Rowley, reviewed by Edmund Horner
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f-NG1mRM0VOtkAG7=ZLQWihoqees9R4ki3CKBB0-fRfCA@mail.gmail.com
find_appinfos_by_relids had quite a large overhead when the number of
items in the append_rel_list was high, as it had to trawl through the
append_rel_list looking for AppendRelInfos belonging to the given
childrelids. Since there can only be a single AppendRelInfo for each
child rel, it seems much better to store an array in PlannerInfo which
indexes these by child relid, making the function O(1) rather than O(N).
This function was only called once inside the planner, so just replace
that call with a lookup to the new array. find_childrel_appendrelinfo
is now unused and thus removed.
This fixes a planner performance regression new to v11 reported by
Thomas Reiss.
Author: David Rowley
Reported-by: Thomas Reiss
Reviewed-by: Ashutosh Bapat
Reviewed-by: Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/94dd7a4b-5e50-0712-911d-2278e055c622@dalibo.com
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
If the inner relation can be proven unique, that is it can have no more
than one matching row for any row of the outer query, then we might as
well implement the semijoin as a plain inner join, allowing substantially
more freedom to the planner. This is a form of outer join strength
reduction, but it can't be implemented in reduce_outer_joins() because
we don't have enough info about the individual relations at that stage.
Instead do it much like remove_useless_joins(): once we've built base
relations, we can make another pass over the SpecialJoinInfo list and
get rid of any entries representing reducible semijoins.
This is essentially a followon to the inner-unique patch (commit 9c7f5229a)
and makes use of the proof machinery that that patch created. We need only
minor refactoring of innerrel_is_unique's API to support this usage.
Per performance complaint from Teodor Sigaev.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/f994fc98-389f-4a46-d1bc-c42e05cb43ed@sigaev.ru
Currently, the only type of child relation is an "other member rel",
which is the child of a baserel, but in the future joins and even
upper relations may have child rels. To facilitate that, introduce
macros that test to test for particular RelOptKind values, and use
them in various places where they help to clarify the sense of a test.
(For example, a test may allow RELOPT_OTHER_MEMBER_REL either because
it intends to allow child rels, or because it intends to allow simple
rels.)
Also, remove find_childrel_top_parent, which will not work for a
child rel that is not a baserel. Instead, add a new RelOptInfo
member top_parent_relids to track the same kind of information in a
more generic manner.
Ashutosh Bapat, slightly tweaked by me. Review and testing of the
patch set from which this was taken by Rajkumar Raghuwanshi and Rafia
Sabih.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoagTnF2yqR3PT2rv=om=wJiZ4-A+ATwdnriTGku1CLYxA@mail.gmail.com
We need to scan the whole parse tree for parallel-unsafe functions.
If there are none, we'll later need to determine whether particular
subtrees contain any parallel-restricted functions. The previous coding
retained no knowledge from the first scan, even though this is very
wasteful in the common case where the query contains only parallel-safe
functions. We can bypass all of the later scans by remembering that fact.
This provides a small but measurable speed improvement when the case
applies, and shouldn't cost anything when it doesn't.
Patch by me, reviewed by Robert Haas
Discussion: <3740.1471538387@sss.pgh.pa.us>
This patch provides a new implementation of the logic added by commit
137805f89 and later removed by 77ba61080. It differs from the original
primarily in expending much less effort per joinrel in large queries,
which it accomplishes by doing most of the matching work once per query not
once per joinrel. Hopefully, it's also less buggy and better commented.
The never-documented enable_fkey_estimates GUC remains gone.
There remains work to be done to make the selectivity estimates account
for nulls in FK referencing columns; but that was true of the original
patch as well. We may be able to address this point later in beta.
In the meantime, any error should be in the direction of overestimating
rather than underestimating joinrel sizes, which seems like the direction
we want to err in.
Tomas Vondra and Tom Lane
Discussion: <31041.1465069446@sss.pgh.pa.us>
In commit 19a541143a I did not make PathTarget a subtype of Node,
and embedded a RelOptInfo's reltarget directly into it rather than having
a separately-allocated Node. In hindsight that was misguided
micro-optimization, enabled by the fact that at that point we didn't have
any Paths with custom PathTargets. Now that PathTarget processing has
been fleshed out some more, it's easier to see that it's better to have
PathTarget as an indepedent Node type, even if it does cost us one more
palloc to create a RelOptInfo. So change it while we still can.
This commit just changes the representation, without doing anything more
interesting than that.
This patch removes some redundant cost calculations that I left for later
cleanup in commit 3fc6e2d7f5. There's now a uniform policy that the
make_foo() convenience functions don't do any cost calculations. Most of
their callers copy costs from the source Path node, and for those that
don't, the calculation in the make_foo() function wasn't necessarily right
anyhow. (make_result() was particularly a mess, as it was serving multiple
callers using cost calcs designed for only the first one or two that had
ever existed.) Aside from saving a few cycles, this ensures that what
EXPLAIN prints matches the costs we used for planning purposes. It does
not change any planner decisions, since the decisions are already made.
I've been saying we needed to do this for more than five years, and here it
finally is. This patch removes the ever-growing tangle of spaghetti logic
that grouping_planner() used to use to try to identify the best plan for
post-scan/join query steps. Now, there is (nearly) independent
consideration of each execution step, and entirely separate construction of
Paths to represent each of the possible ways to do that step. We choose
the best Path or set of Paths using the same add_path() logic that's been
used inside query_planner() for years.
In addition, this patch removes the old restriction that subquery_planner()
could return only a single Plan. It now returns a RelOptInfo containing a
set of Paths, just as query_planner() does, and the parent query level can
use each of those Paths as the basis of a SubqueryScanPath at its level.
This allows finding some optimizations that we missed before, wherein a
subquery was capable of returning presorted data and thereby avoiding a
sort in the parent level, making the overall cost cheaper even though
delivering sorted output was not the cheapest plan for the subquery in
isolation. (A couple of regression test outputs change in consequence of
that. However, there is very little change in visible planner behavior
overall, because the point of this patch is not to get immediate planning
benefits but to create the infrastructure for future improvements.)
There is a great deal left to do here. This patch unblocks a lot of
planner work that was basically impractical in the old code structure,
such as allowing FDWs to implement remote aggregation, or rewriting
plan_set_operations() to allow consideration of multiple implementation
orders for set operations. (The latter will likely require a full
rewrite of plan_set_operations(); what I've done here is only to fix it
to return Paths not Plans.) I have also left unfinished some localized
refactoring in createplan.c and planner.c, because it was not necessary
to get this patch to a working state.
Thanks to Robert Haas, David Rowley, and Amit Kapila for review.
The core innovation of this patch is the introduction of the concept
of a partial path; that is, a path which if executed in parallel will
generate a subset of the output rows in each process. Gathering a
partial path produces an ordinary (complete) path. This allows us to
generate paths for parallel joins by joining a partial path for one
side (which at the baserel level is currently always a Partial Seq
Scan) to an ordinary path on the other side. This is subject to
various restrictions at present, especially that this strategy seems
unlikely to be sensible for merge joins, so only nested loops and
hash joins paths are generated.
This also allows an Append node to be pushed below a Gather node in
the case of a partitioned table.
Testing revealed that early versions of this patch made poor decisions
in some cases, which turned out to be caused by the fact that the
original cost model for Parallel Seq Scan wasn't very good. So this
patch tries to make some modest improvements in that area.
There is much more to be done in the area of generating good parallel
plans in all cases, but this seems like a useful step forward.
Patch by me, reviewed by Dilip Kumar and Amit Kapila.
I originally modeled this data structure on SpecialJoinInfo, but after
commit acfcd45cac that looks like a pretty poor decision.
All we really need is relid sets identifying laterally-referenced rels;
and most of the time, what we want to know about includes indirect lateral
references, a case the LateralJoinInfo data was unsuited to compute with
any efficiency. The previous commit redefined RelOptInfo.lateral_relids
as the transitive closure of lateral references, so that it easily supports
checking indirect references. For the places where we really do want just
direct references, add a new RelOptInfo field direct_lateral_relids, which
is easily set up as a copy of lateral_relids before we perform the
transitive closure calculation. Then we can just drop lateral_info_list
and LateralJoinInfo and the supporting code. This makes the planner's
handling of lateral references noticeably more efficient, and shorter too.
Such a change can't be back-patched into stable branches for fear of
breaking extensions that might be looking at the planner's data structures;
but it seems not too late to push it into 9.5, so I've done so.
Add a new flag, consider_parallel, to each RelOptInfo, indicating
whether a plan for that relation could conceivably be run inside of
a parallel worker. Right now, we're pretty conservative: for example,
it might be possible to defer applying a parallel-restricted qual
in a worker, and later do it in the leader, but right now we just
don't try to parallelize access to that relation. That's probably
the right decision in most cases, anyway.
Using the new flag, generate parallel sequential scan plans for plain
baserels, meaning that we now have parallel sequential scan in
PostgreSQL. The logic here is pretty unsophisticated right now: the
costing model probably isn't right in detail, and we can't push joins
beneath Gather nodes, so the number of plans that can actually benefit
from this is pretty limited right now. Lots more work is needed.
Nevertheless, it seems time to enable this functionality so that all
this code can actually be tested easily by users and developers.
Note that, if you wish to test this functionality, it will be
necessary to set max_parallel_degree to a value greater than the
default of 0. Once a few more loose ends have been tidied up here, we
might want to consider changing the default value of this GUC, but
I'm leaving it alone for now.
Along the way, fix a bug in cost_gather: the previous coding thought
that a Gather node's transfer overhead should be costed on the basis of
the relation size rather than the number of tuples that actually need
to be passed off to the leader.
Patch by me, reviewed in earlier versions by Amit Kapila.
It's possible to extract a restriction OR clause from a join clause that
has the form of an OR-of-ANDs, if each sub-AND includes a clause that
mentions only one specific relation. While PG has been aware of that idea
for many years, the code previously only did it if it could extract an
indexable OR clause. On reflection, though, that seems a silly limitation:
adding a restriction clause can be a win by reducing the number of rows
that have to be filtered at the join step, even if we have to test the
clause as a plain filter clause during the scan. This should be especially
useful for foreign tables, where the change can cut the number of rows that
have to be retrieved from the foreign server; but testing shows it can win
even on local tables. Per a suggestion from Robert Haas.
As a heuristic, I made the code accept an extracted restriction clause
if its estimated selectivity is less than 0.9, which will probably result
in accepting extracted clauses just about always. We might need to tweak
that later based on experience.
Since the code no longer has even a weak connection to Path creation,
remove orindxpath.c and create a new file optimizer/util/orclauses.c.
There's some additional janitorial cleanup of now-dead code that needs
to happen, but it seems like that's a fit subject for a separate commit.
The planner largely failed to consider the possibility that a
PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain a lateral reference to a Var
coming from somewhere outside the PHV's syntactic scope. We had a previous
report of a problem in this area, which I tried to fix in a quick-hack way
in commit 4da6439bd8, but Antonin Houska
pointed out that there were still some problems, and investigation turned
up other issues. This patch largely reverts that commit in favor of a more
thoroughly thought-through solution. The new theory is that a PHV's
ph_eval_at level cannot be higher than its original syntactic level. If it
contains lateral references, those don't change the ph_eval_at level, but
rather they create a lateral-reference requirement for the ph_eval_at join
relation. The code in joinpath.c needs to handle that.
Another issue is that createplan.c wasn't handling nested PlaceHolderVars
properly.
In passing, push knowledge of lateral-reference checks for join clauses
into join_clause_is_movable_to. This is mainly so that FDWs don't need
to deal with it.
This patch doesn't fix the original join-qual-placement problem reported by
Jeremy Evans (and indeed, one of the new regression test cases shows the
wrong answer because of that). But the PlaceHolderVar problems need to be
fixed before that issue can be addressed, so committing this separately
seems reasonable.
Formerly, query_planner returned one or possibly two Paths for the topmost
join relation, so that grouping_planner didn't see the join RelOptInfo
(at least not directly; it didn't have any hesitation about examining
cheapest_path->parent, though). However, correct selection of the Paths
involved a significant amount of coupling between query_planner and
grouping_planner, a problem which has gotten worse over time. It seems
best to give up on this API choice and instead return the topmost
RelOptInfo explicitly. Then grouping_planner can pull out the Paths it
wants from the rel's path list. In this way we can remove all knowledge
of grouping behaviors from query_planner.
The only real benefit of the old way is that in the case of an empty
FROM clause, we never made any RelOptInfos at all, just a Path. Now
we have to gin up a dummy RelOptInfo to represent the empty FROM clause.
That's not a very big deal though.
While at it, simplify query_planner's API a bit more by having the caller
set up root->tuple_fraction and root->limit_tuples, rather than passing
those values as separate parameters. Since query_planner no longer does
anything with either value, requiring it to fill the PlannerInfo fields
seemed pretty arbitrary.
This patch just rearranges code; it doesn't (intentionally) change any
behaviors. Followup patches will do more interesting things.
This patch gets rid of the concept of, and infrastructure for,
non-canonical PathKeys; we now only ever create canonical pathkey lists.
The need for non-canonical pathkeys came from the desire to have
grouping_planner initialize query_pathkeys and related pathkey lists before
calling query_planner. However, since query_planner didn't actually *do*
anything with those lists before they'd been made canonical, we can get rid
of the whole mess by just not creating the lists at all until the point
where we formerly canonicalized them.
There are several ways in which we could implement that without making
query_planner itself deal with grouping/sorting features (which are
supposed to be the province of grouping_planner). I chose to add a
callback function to query_planner's API; other alternatives would have
required adding more fields to PlannerInfo, which while not bad in itself
would create an ABI break for planner-related plugins in the 9.2 release
series. This still breaks ABI for anything that calls query_planner
directly, but it seems somewhat unlikely that there are any such plugins.
I had originally conceived of this change as merely a step on the way to
fixing bug #8049 from Teun Hoogendoorn; but it turns out that this fixes
that bug all by itself, as per the added regression test. The reason is
that now get_eclass_for_sort_expr is adding the ORDER BY expression at the
end of EquivalenceClass creation not the start, and so anything that is in
a multi-member EquivalenceClass has already been created with correct
em_nullable_relids. I am suspicious that there are related scenarios in
which we still need to teach get_eclass_for_sort_expr to compute correct
nullable_relids, but am not eager to risk destabilizing either 9.2 or 9.3
to fix bugs that are only hypothetical. So for the moment, do this and
stop here.
Back-patch to 9.2 but not to earlier branches, since they don't exhibit
this bug for lack of join-clause-movement logic that depends on
em_nullable_relids being correct. (We might have to revisit that choice
if any related bugs turn up.) In 9.2, don't change the signature of
make_pathkeys_for_sortclauses nor remove canonicalize_pathkeys, so as
not to risk more plugin breakage than we have to.
In the initial cut at LATERAL, I kept the rule that cheapest_total_path
was always unparameterized, which meant it had to be NULL if the relation
has no unparameterized paths. It turns out to work much more nicely if
we always have *some* path nominated as cheapest-total for each relation.
In particular, let's still say it's the cheapest unparameterized path if
there is one; if not, take the cheapest-total-cost path among those of
the minimum available parameterization. (The first rule is actually
a special case of the second.)
This allows reversion of some temporary lobotomizations I'd put in place.
In particular, the planner can now consider hash and merge joins for
joins below a parameter-supplying nestloop, even if there aren't any
unparameterized paths available. This should bring planning of
LATERAL-containing queries to the same level as queries not using that
feature.
Along the way, simplify management of parameterized paths in add_path()
and friends. In the original coding for parameterized paths in 9.2,
I tried to minimize the logic changes in add_path(), so it just treated
parameterization as yet another dimension of comparison for paths.
We later made it ignore pathkeys (sort ordering) of parameterized paths,
on the grounds that ordering isn't a useful property for the path on the
inside of a nestloop, so we might as well get rid of useless parameterized
paths as quickly as possible. But we didn't take that reasoning as far as
we should have. Startup cost isn't a useful property inside a nestloop
either, so add_path() ought to discount startup cost of parameterized paths
as well. Having done that, the secondary sorting I'd implemented (in
add_parameterized_path) is no longer needed --- any parameterized path that
survives add_path() at all is worth considering at higher levels. So this
should be a bit faster as well as simpler.
This patch takes care of a number of problems having to do with failure
to choose valid join orders and incorrect handling of lateral references
pulled up from subqueries. Notable changes:
* Add a LateralJoinInfo data structure similar to SpecialJoinInfo, to
represent join ordering constraints created by lateral references.
(I first considered extending the SpecialJoinInfo structure, but the
semantics are different enough that a separate data structure seems
better.) Extend join_is_legal() and related functions to prevent trying
to form unworkable joins, and to ensure that we will consider joins that
satisfy lateral references even if the joins would be clauseless.
* Fill in the infrastructure needed for the last few types of relation scan
paths to support parameterization. We'd have wanted this eventually
anyway, but it is necessary now because a relation that gets pulled up out
of a UNION ALL subquery may acquire a reltargetlist containing lateral
references, meaning that its paths *have* to be parameterized whether or
not we have any code that can push join quals down into the scan.
* Compute data about lateral references early in query_planner(), and save
in RelOptInfo nodes, to avoid repetitive calculations later.
* Assorted corner-case bug fixes.
There's probably still some bugs left, but this is a lot closer to being
real than it was before.
In commit 57664ed25e I tried to fix a bug
reported by Teodor Sigaev by making non-simple-Var output columns distinct
(by wrapping their expressions with dummy PlaceHolderVar nodes). This did
not work too well. Commit b28ffd0fcc fixed
some ensuing problems with matching to child indexes, but per a recent
report from Claus Stadler, constraint exclusion of UNION ALL subqueries was
still broken, because constant-simplification didn't handle the injected
PlaceHolderVars well either. On reflection, the original patch was quite
misguided: there is no reason to expect that EquivalenceClass child members
will be distinct. So instead of trying to make them so, we should ensure
that we can cope with the situation when they're not.
Accordingly, this patch reverts the code changes in the above-mentioned
commits (though the regression test cases they added stay). Instead, I've
added assorted defenses to make sure that duplicate EC child members don't
cause any problems. Teodor's original problem ("MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend") is addressed more directly by
revising prepare_sort_from_pathkeys to let the parent MergeAppend's sort
list guide creation of each child's sort list.
In passing, get rid of add_sort_column; as far as I can tell, testing for
duplicate sort keys at this stage is dead code. Certainly it doesn't
trigger often enough to be worth expending cycles on in ordinary queries.
And keeping the test would've greatly complicated the new logic in
prepare_sort_from_pathkeys, because comparing pathkey list entries against
a previous output array requires that we not skip any entries in the list.
Back-patch to 9.1, like the previous patches. The only known issue in
this area that wasn't caused by the ill-advised previous patches was the
MergeAppend planning failure, which of course is not relevant before 9.1.
It's possible that we need some of the new defenses against duplicate child
EC entries in older branches, but until there's some clear evidence of that
I'm going to refrain from back-patching further.
This patch fixes the planner so that it can generate nestloop-with-
inner-indexscan plans even with one or more levels of joining between
the indexscan and the nestloop join that is supplying the parameter.
The executor was fixed to handle such cases some time ago, but the
planner was not ready. This should improve our plans in many situations
where join ordering restrictions formerly forced complete table scans.
There is probably a fair amount of tuning work yet to be done, because
of various heuristics that have been added to limit the number of
parameterized paths considered. However, we are not going to find out
what needs to be adjusted until the code gets some real-world use, so
it's time to get it in there where it can be tested easily.
Note API change for index AM amcostestimate functions. I'm not aware of
any non-core index AMs, but if there are any, they will need minor
adjustments.
Add PlaceHolderVar wrappers as needed to make UNION ALL sub-select output
expressions appear non-constant and distinct from each other. This makes
the world safe for add_child_rel_equivalences to do what it does. Before,
it was possible for that function to add identical expressions to different
EquivalenceClasses, which logically should imply merging such ECs, which
would be wrong; or to improperly add a constant to an EquivalenceClass,
drastically changing its behavior. Per report from Teodor Sigaev.
The only currently known consequence of this bug is "MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend" planner failures in 9.1 and later.
I am suspicious that there may be other failure modes that could affect
older release branches; but in the absence of any hard evidence, I'll
refrain from back-patching further than 9.1.
Formerly, set_subquery_pathlist and other creators of plans for subqueries
saved only the rangetable and rowMarks lists from the lower-level
PlannerInfo. But there's no reason not to remember the whole PlannerInfo,
and indeed this turns out to simplify matters in a number of places.
The immediate reason for doing this was so that the subroot will still be
accessible when we're trying to extract column statistics out of an
already-planned subquery. But now that I've done it, it seems like a good
code-beautification effort in its own right.
I also chose to get rid of the transient subrtable and subrowmark fields in
SubqueryScan nodes, in favor of having setrefs.c look up the subquery's
RelOptInfo. That required changing all the APIs in setrefs.c to pass
PlannerInfo not PlannerGlobal, which was a large but quite mechanical
transformation.
One side-effect not foreseen at the beginning is that this finally broke
inheritance_planner's assumption that replanning the same subquery RTE N
times would necessarily give interchangeable results each time. That
assumption was always pretty risky, but now we really have to make a
separate RTE for each instance so that there's a place to carry the
separate subroots.
Instead of playing cute games with pathkeys, just build a direct
representation of the intended sub-select, and feed it through
query_planner to get a Path for the index access. This is a bit slower
than 9.1's previous method, since we'll duplicate most of the overhead of
query_planner; but since the whole optimization only applies to rather
simple single-table queries, that probably won't be much of a problem in
practice. The advantage is that we get to do the right thing when there's
a partial index that needs the implicit IS NOT NULL clause to be usable.
Also, although this makes planagg.c be a bit more closely tied to the
ordering of operations in grouping_planner, we can get rid of some coupling
to lower-level parts of the planner. Per complaint from Marti Raudsepp.
Fix things so that top-N sorting can be used in child Sort nodes of a
MergeAppend node, when there is a LIMIT and no intervening joins or
grouping. Actually doing this on the executor side isn't too bad,
but it's a bit messier to get the planner to cost it properly.
Per gripe from Robert Haas.
In passing, fix an oversight in the original top-N-sorting patch:
query_planner should not assume that a LIMIT can be used to make an
explicit sort cheaper when there will be grouping or aggregation in
between. Possibly this should be back-patched, but I'm not sure the
mistake is serious enough to be a real problem in practice.
Per my recent proposal, get rid of all the direct inspection of indexes
and manual generation of paths in planagg.c. Instead, set up
EquivalenceClasses for the aggregate argument expressions, and let the
regular path generation logic deal with creating paths that can satisfy
those sort orders. This makes planagg.c a bit more visible to the rest
of the planner than it was originally, but the approach is basically a lot
cleaner than before. A major advantage of doing it this way is that we get
MIN/MAX optimization on inheritance trees (using MergeAppend of indexscans)
practically for free, whereas in the old way we'd have had to add a whole
lot more duplicative logic.
One small disadvantage of this approach is that MIN/MAX aggregates can no
longer exploit partial indexes having an "x IS NOT NULL" predicate, unless
that restriction or something that implies it is specified in the query.
The previous implementation was able to use the added "x IS NOT NULL"
condition as an extra predicate proof condition, but in this version we
rely entirely on indexes that are considered usable by the main planning
process. That seems a fair tradeoff for the simplicity and functionality
gained.
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.
by adding a requirement that build_join_rel add new join RelOptInfos to the
appropriate list immediately at creation. Per report from Robert Haas,
the list_concat_unique_ptr() calls that this change eliminates were taking
the lion's share of the runtime in larger join problems. This doesn't do
anything to fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join
problems, but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.
Note: because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built,
it might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
alternatives have exactly the same costs. There is one example in the
regression tests.
