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.
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 ...
optimizer rather than parser. This has many advantages, such as not
getting fooled by chance uses of operator names ~ and ~~ (the operators
are identified by OID now), and not creating useless comparison operations
in contexts where the comparisons will not actually be used as indexquals.
The new code also recognizes exact-match LIKE and regex patterns, and
produces an = indexqual instead of >= and <=.
This change does NOT fix the problem with non-ASCII locales: the code
still doesn't know how to generate an upper bound indexqual for non-ASCII
collation order. But it's no worse than before, just the same deficiency
in a different place...
Also, dike out loc_restrictinfo fields in Plan nodes. These were doing
nothing useful in the absence of 'expensive functions' optimization,
and they took a considerable amount of processing to fill in.
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Marc G. Fournier