Until now PostgreSQL has not been very smart about optimizing away IS
NOT NULL base quals on columns defined as NOT NULL. The evaluation of
these needless quals adds overhead. Ordinarily, anyone who came
complaining about that would likely just have been told to not include
the qual in their query if it's not required. However, a recent bug
report indicates this might not always be possible.
Bug 17540 highlighted that when we optimize Min/Max aggregates the IS NOT
NULL qual that the planner adds to make the rewritten plan ignore NULLs
can cause issues with poor index choice. That particular case
demonstrated that other quals, especially ones where no statistics are
available to allow the planner a chance at estimating an approximate
selectivity for can result in poor index choice due to cheap startup paths
being prefered with LIMIT 1.
Here we take generic approach to fixing this by having the planner check
for NOT NULL columns and just have the planner remove these quals (when
they're not needed) for all queries, not just when optimizing Min/Max
aggregates.
Additionally, here we also detect IS NULL quals on a NOT NULL column and
transform that into a gating qual so that we don't have to perform the
scan at all. This also works for join relations when the Var is not
nullable by any outer join.
This also helps with the self-join removal work as it must replace
strict join quals with IS NOT NULL quals to ensure equivalence with the
original query.
Author: David Rowley, Richard Guo, Andy Fan
Reviewed-by: Richard Guo, David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvqg6XZDhYRPz0zgOcevSMo0d3vxA9DvHrZtKfqO30WTnw@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17540-7aa1855ad5ec18b4%40postgresql.org
Traditionally we used the same Var struct to represent the value
of a table column everywhere in parse and plan trees. This choice
predates our support for SQL outer joins, and it's really a pretty
bad idea with outer joins, because the Var's value can depend on
where it is in the tree: it might go to NULL above an outer join.
So expression nodes that are equal() per equalfuncs.c might not
represent the same value, which is a huge correctness hazard for
the planner.
To improve this, decorate Var nodes with a bitmapset showing
which outer joins (identified by RTE indexes) may have nulled
them at the point in the parse tree where the Var appears.
This allows us to trust that equal() Vars represent the same value.
A certain amount of klugery is still needed to cope with cases
where we re-order two outer joins, but it's possible to make it
work without sacrificing that core principle. PlaceHolderVars
receive similar decoration for the same reason.
In the planner, we include these outer join bitmapsets into the relids
that an expression is considered to depend on, and in consequence also
add outer-join relids to the relids of join RelOptInfos. This allows
us to correctly perceive whether an expression can be calculated above
or below a particular outer join.
This change affects FDWs that want to plan foreign joins. They *must*
follow suit when labeling foreign joins in order to match with the
core planner, but for many purposes (if postgres_fdw is any guide)
they'd prefer to consider only base relations within the join.
To support both requirements, redefine ForeignScan.fs_relids as
base+OJ relids, and add a new field fs_base_relids that's set up by
the core planner.
Large though it is, this commit just does the minimum necessary to
install the new mechanisms and get check-world passing again.
Follow-up patches will perform some cleanup. (The README additions
and comments mention some stuff that will appear in the follow-up.)
Patch by me; thanks to Richard Guo for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/830269.1656693747@sss.pgh.pa.us
This patch adds a way of iterating through the members of a bitmapset
nondestructively, unlike the old way with bms_first_member(). While
bms_next_member() is very slightly slower than bms_first_member()
(at least for typical-size bitmapsets), eliminating the need to palloc
and pfree a temporary copy of the target bitmapset is a significant win.
So this method should be preferred in all cases where a temporary copy
would be necessary.
Tom Lane, with suggestions from Dean Rasheed and David Rowley
We should be willing to cross-join two small relations if that allows us
to use an inner indexscan on a large relation (that is, the potential
indexqual for the large table requires both smaller relations). This
worked in simple cases but fell apart as soon as there was a join clause
to a fourth relation, because the existence of any two-relation join clause
caused the planner to not consider clauseless joins between other base
relations. The added regression test shows an example case adapted from
a recent complaint from Benoit Delbosc.
Adjust have_relevant_joinclause, have_relevant_eclass_joinclause, and
has_relevant_eclass_joinclause to consider that a join clause mentioning
three or more relations is sufficient grounds for joining any subset of
those relations, even if we have to do so via a cartesian join. Since such
clauses are relatively uncommon, this shouldn't affect planning speed on
typical queries; in fact it should help a bit, because the latter two
functions in particular get significantly simpler.
Although this is arguably a bug fix, I'm not going to risk back-patching
it, since it might have currently-unforeseen consequences.
In these cases a qual can get marked with the removable rel in its
required_relids, but this is just to schedule its evaluation correctly, not
because it really depends on the rel. We were assuming that, in effect,
we could throw away *all* quals so marked, which is nonsense. Tighten up
the logic to be a little more paranoid about which quals belong to the
outer join being considered for removal, and arrange for all quals that
don't belong to be updated so they will still get evaluated correctly.
Also fix another problem that happened to be exposed by this test case,
which was that make_join_rel() was failing to notice some cases where
a constant-false qual could be used to prove a join relation empty. If it's
a pushed-down constant false, then the relation is empty even if it's an
outer join, because the qual applies after the outer join expansion.
Per report from Nathan Grange. Back-patch into 9.0.
considered when it is necessary to do so because of a join-order restriction
(that is, an outer-join or IN-subselect construct). The former coding was a
bit ad-hoc and inconsistent, and it missed some cases, as exposed by Mario
Weilguni's recent bug report. His specific problem was that an IN could be
turned into a "clauseless" join due to constant-propagation removing the IN's
joinclause, and if the IN's subselect involved more than one relation and
there was more than one such IN linking to the same upper relation, then the
only valid join orders involve "bushy" plans but we would fail to consider the
specific paths needed to get there. (See the example case added to the join
regression test.) On examining the code I wonder if there weren't some other
problem cases too; in particular it seems that GEQO was defending against a
different set of corner cases than the main planner was. There was also an
efficiency problem, in that when we did realize we needed a clauseless join
because of an IN, we'd consider clauseless joins against every other relation
whether this was sensible or not. It seems a better design is to use the
outer-join and in-clause lists as a backup heuristic, just as the rule of
joining only where there are joinclauses is a heuristic: we'll join two
relations if they have a usable joinclause *or* this might be necessary to
satisfy an outer-join or IN-clause join order restriction. I refactored the
code to have just one place considering this instead of three, and made sure
that it covered all the cases that any of them had been considering.
Backpatch as far as 8.1 (which has only the IN-clause form of the disease).
By rights 8.0 and 7.4 should have the bug too, but they accidentally fail
to fail, because the joininfo structure used in those releases preserves some
memory of there having once been a joinclause between the inner and outer
sides of an IN, and so it leads the code in the right direction anyway.
I'll be conservative and not touch them.
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.
joinclause doesn't use any outer-side vars) requires a "bushy" plan to be
created. The normal heuristic to avoid joins with no joinclause has to be
overridden in that case. Problem is new in 8.2; before that we forced the
outer join order anyway. Per example from Teodor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David Rowley
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Magnus Hagander
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway