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'.
nonoverlap_sets() and is_subset() to list.c, where they should have lived
to begin with, and rename to nonoverlap_setsi and is_subseti since they
only work on integer lists.
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).
sort order down into planner, instead of handling it only at the very top
level of the planner. This fixes many things. An explicit sort is now
avoided if there is a cheaper alternative (typically an indexscan) not
only for ORDER BY, but also for the internal sort of GROUP BY. It works
even when there is no other reason (such as a WHERE condition) to consider
the indexscan. It works for indexes on functions. It works for indexes
on functions, backwards. It's just so cool...
CAUTION: I have changed the representation of SortClause nodes, therefore
THIS UPDATE BREAKS STORED RULES. You will need to initdb.
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.
hashjoinable clause, not one path for a randomly-chosen element of each
set of clauses with the same join operator. That is, if you wrote
SELECT ... WHERE t1.f1 = t2.f2 and t1.f3 = t2.f4,
and both '=' ops were the same opcode (say, all four fields are int4),
then the system would either consider hashing on f1=f2 or on f3=f4,
but it would *not* consider both possibilities. Boo hiss.
Also, revise estimation of hashjoin costs to include a penalty when the
inner join var has a high disbursion --- ie, the most common value is
pretty common. This tends to lead to badly skewed hash bucket occupancy
and way more comparisons than you'd expect on average.
I imagine that the cost calculation still needs tweaking, but at least
it generates a more reasonable plan than before on George Young's example.
rels that the inner path needs to join to, but it was only checking for
the first one. Failure could only have been observed with an OR-clause
that mentions 3 or more tables, and then only if the bogus path was
actually selected as cheapest ...
remove optimizer's arbitrary limit on how large a join it will use hashing
for. (The limit was too large to prevent the problems we'd been seeing,
anyway...)