Stefan Kaltenbrunner. The most reasonable behavior (at least for the near
term) seems to be to ignore the PlaceHolderVar and examine its argument
instead. In support of this, change the API of pull_var_clause() to allow
callers to request recursion into PlaceHolderVars. Currently
estimate_num_groups() is the only customer for that behavior, but where
there's one there may be others.
that represent some expression that we desire to compute below the top level
of the plan, and then let that value "bubble up" as though it were a plain
Var (ie, a column value).
The immediate application is to allow sub-selects to be flattened even when
they are below an outer join and have non-nullable output expressions.
Formerly we couldn't flatten because such an expression wouldn't properly
go to NULL when evaluated above the outer join. Now, we wrap it in a
PlaceHolderVar and arrange for the actual evaluation to occur below the outer
join. When the resulting Var bubbles up through the join, it will be set to
NULL if necessary, yielding the correct results. This fixes a planner
limitation that's existed since 7.1.
In future we might want to use this mechanism to re-introduce some form of
Hellerstein's "expensive functions" optimization, ie place the evaluation of
an expensive function at the most suitable point in the plan tree.
into nodes/nodeFuncs, so as to reduce wanton cross-subsystem #includes inside
the backend. There's probably more that should be done along this line,
but this is a start anyway.
hashtable entries for tuples that are found only in the second input: they
can never contribute to the output. Furthermore, this implies that the
planner should endeavor to put first the smaller (in number of groups) input
relation for an INTERSECT. Implement that, and upgrade prepunion's estimation
of the number of rows returned by setops so that there's some amount of sanity
in the estimate of which one is smaller.
but seem like a separate patch since most of the remaining work is on the
executor side.) I took the opportunity to push selection of the grouping
operators for set operations into the parser where it belongs. Otherwise this
is just a small exercise in making prepunion.c consider both alternatives.
As with the recent DISTINCT patch, this means we can UNION on datatypes that
can hash but not sort, and it means that UNION without ORDER BY is no longer
certain to produce sorted output.
as per my recent proposal:
1. Fold SortClause and GroupClause into a single node type SortGroupClause.
We were already relying on them to be struct-equivalent, so using two node
tags wasn't accomplishing much except to get in the way of comparing items
with equal().
2. Add an "eqop" field to SortGroupClause to carry the associated equality
operator. This is cheap for the parser to get at the same time it's looking
up the sort operator, and storing it eliminates the need for repeated
not-so-cheap lookups during planning. In future this will also let us
represent GROUP/DISTINCT operations on datatypes that have hash opclasses
but no btree opclasses (ie, they have equality but no natural sort order).
The previous representation simply didn't work for that, since its only
indicator of comparison semantics was a sort operator.
3. Add a hasDistinctOn boolean to struct Query to explicitly record whether
the distinctClause came from DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON. This allows removing
some complicated and not 100% bulletproof code that attempted to figure
that out from the distinctClause alone.
This patch doesn't in itself create any new capability, but it's necessary
infrastructure for future attempts to use hash-based grouping for DISTINCT
and UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT.
predictable manner; in particular that if you say ORDER BY output-column-ref,
it will in fact sort by that specific column even if there are multiple
syntactic matches. An example is
SELECT random() AS a, random() AS b FROM ... ORDER BY b, a;
While the use-case for this might be a bit debatable, it worked as expected
in earlier releases, so we should preserve the behavior for 8.3. Per my
recent proposal.
While at it, fix convert_subquery_pathkeys() to handle RelabelType stripping
in both directions; it needs this for the same reasons make_sort_from_pathkeys
does.
to be able to discard top-level RelabelType nodes on *both* sides of the
equivalence-class-to-target-list comparison, since make_pathkey_from_sortinfo
might either add or remove a RelabelType. Also fix the latter to do the
removal case cleanly. Per example from Peter.
same data type and same typmod, we show that typmod as the output
typmod, rather than generic -1. This responds to several complaints
over the past few years about UNIONs unexpectedly dropping length or
precision info.
thereby sharing code with the inheritance case. This puts the UNION-ALL-view
approach to partitioned tables on par with inheritance, so far as constraint
exclusion is concerned: it works either way. (Still need to update the docs
to say so.) The definition of "simple UNION ALL" is a little simpler than
I would like --- basically the union arms can only be SELECT * FROM foo
--- but it's good enough for partitioned-table cases.
few palloc's. I also chose to eliminate the restype and restypmod fields
entirely, since they are redundant with information stored in the node's
contained expression; re-examining the expression at need seems simpler
and more reliable than trying to keep restype/restypmod up to date.
initdb forced due to change in contents of stored rules.
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 ...
1. Solve the problem of not having TOAST references hiding inside composite
values by establishing the rule that toasting only goes one level deep:
a tuple can contain toasted fields, but a composite-type datum that is
to be inserted into a tuple cannot. Enforcing this in heap_formtuple
is relatively cheap and it avoids a large increase in the cost of running
the tuptoaster during final storage of a row.
2. Fix some interesting problems in expansion of inherited queries that
reference whole-row variables. We never really did this correctly before,
but it's now relatively painless to solve by expanding the parent's
whole-row Var into a RowExpr() selecting the proper columns from the
child.
If you dike out the preventive check in CheckAttributeType(),
composite-type columns now seem to actually work. However, we surely
cannot ship them like this --- without I/O for composite types, you
can't get pg_dump to dump tables containing them. So a little more
work still to do.
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.
pointer type when it is not necessary to do so.
For future reference, casting NULL to a pointer type is only necessary
when (a) invoking a function AND either (b) the function has no prototype
OR (c) the function is a varargs function.
node emits only those vars that are actually needed above it in the
plan tree. (There were comments in the code suggesting that this was
done at some point in the dim past, but for a long time we have just
made join nodes emit everything that either input emitted.) Aside from
being marginally more efficient, this fixes the problem noted by Peter
Eisentraut where a join above an IN-implemented-as-join might fail,
because the subplan targetlist constructed in the latter case didn't
meet the expectation of including everything.
Along the way, fix some places that were O(N^2) in the targetlist
length. This is not all the trouble spots for wide queries by any
means, but it's a step forward.
the column by table OID and column number, if it's a simple column
reference. Along the way, get rid of reskey/reskeyop fields in Resdoms.
Turns out that representation was not convenient for either the planner
or the executor; we can make the planner deliver exactly what the
executor wants with no more effort.
initdb forced due to change in stored rule representation.
the outer query. (The implementation is a bit klugy, but it would take
nontrivial restructuring to make it nicer, which this is probably not
worth.) This avoids unnecessary sort steps in examples like
SELECT foo,count(*) FROM (SELECT ... ORDER BY foo,bar) sub GROUP BY foo
which means there is now a reasonable technique for controlling the
order of inputs to custom aggregates, even in the grouping case.
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.
so that all executable expression nodes inherit from a common supertype
Expr. This is somewhat of an exercise in code purity rather than any
real functional advance, but getting rid of the extra Oper or Func node
formerly used in each operator or function call should provide at least
a little space and speed improvement.
initdb forced by changes in stored-rules representation.
as both a GROUP BY item and an output expression, the top-level Group
node should just copy up the evaluated expression value from its input,
rather than re-evaluating the expression. Aside from any performance
benefit this might offer, this avoids a crash when there is a sub-SELECT
in said expression.
from Param nodes, per discussion a few days ago on pghackers. Add new
expression node type FieldSelect that implements the functionality where
it's actually needed. Clean up some other unused fields in Func nodes
as well.
NOTE: initdb forced due to change in stored expression trees for rules.
SELECT DISTINCT ON (expr [, expr ...]) targetlist ...
and there is a check to make sure that the user didn't specify an ORDER BY
that's incompatible with the DISTINCT operation.
Reimplement nodeUnique and nodeGroup to use the proper datatype-specific
equality function for each column being compared --- they used to do
bitwise comparisons or convert the data to text strings and strcmp().
(To add insult to injury, they'd look up the conversion functions once
for each tuple...) Parse/plan representation of DISTINCT is now a list
of SortClause nodes.
initdb forced by querytree change...
Most parts of the planner should ignore, or indeed never even see, uplevel
Vars because they will be or have been replaced by Params. There were a
couple of places that got it wrong though, probably my fault from recent
changes...
and fix_opids processing to a single recursive pass over the plan tree
executed at the very tail end of planning, rather than haphazardly here
and there at different places. Now that tlist Vars do not get modified
until the very end, it's possible to get rid of the klugy var_equal and
match_varid partial-matching routines, and just use plain equal()
throughout the optimizer. This is a step towards allowing merge and
hash joins to be done on expressions instead of only Vars ...
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.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway