There were multiple issues in deserialization of pg_mcv_list values.
Firstly, the data is loaded from syscache, but the deserialization was
performed after ReleaseSysCache(), at which point the data might have
already disappeared. Fixed by moving the calls in statext_mcv_load,
and using the same NULL-handling code as existing stats.
Secondly, the deserialized representation used pointers into the
serialized representation. But that is also unsafe, because the data
may disappear at any time. Fixed by reworking and simplifying the
deserialization code to always copy all the data.
And thirdly, when deserializing values for types passed by value, the
code simply did memcpy(d,s,typlen) which however does not work on
bigendian machines. Fixed by using fetch_att/store_att_byval.
The MCV build should always call get_mincount_for_mcv_list(), as the
there is no other logic to decide whether the MCV list represents all
the data. So just remove the (ngroups > nitems) condition.
Also, when building MCV lists, the number of items was limited by the
statistics target (i.e. up to 10000). But when deserializing the MCV
list, a different value (8192) was used to check the input, causing
an error. Simply ensure that the same value is used in both places.
This should have been included in 7300a69950, but I forgot to include it
in that commit.
Introduce a third extended statistic type, supported by the CREATE
STATISTICS command - MCV lists, a generalization of the statistic
already built and used for individual columns.
Compared to the already supported types (n-distinct coefficients and
functional dependencies), MCV lists are more complex, include column
values and allow estimation of much wider range of common clauses
(equality and inequality conditions, IS NULL, IS NOT NULL etc.).
Similarly to the other types, a new pseudo-type (pg_mcv_list) is used.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Dean Rasheed, David Rowley, Mark Dilger, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/dfdac334-9cf2-2597-fb27-f0fb3753f435@2ndquadrant.com
Tomas Vondra