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.
extracting from an AND subclause just those opclauses that are relevant
for a particular index. For example, we can now consider using an index
on x to process WHERE (x = 1 AND y = 2) OR (x = 2 AND y = 4) OR ...
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).
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.
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.
identified by Hiroshi (incorrect cost attributed to OR clauses
after multiple passes through set_rest_selec()). I think the code
was trying to allow selectivities of OR subclauses to be passed in
from outside, but noplace was actually passing any useful data, and
set_rest_selec() was passing wrong data.
Restructure representation of "indexqual" in IndexPath nodes so that
it is the same as for indxqual in completed IndexScan nodes: namely,
a toplevel list with an entry for each pass of the index scan, having
sublists that are implicitly-ANDed index qual conditions for that pass.
You don't want to know what the old representation was :-(
Improve documentation of OR-clause indexscan functions.
Remove useless 'notclause' field from RestrictInfo nodes. (This might
force an initdb for anyone who has stored rules containing RestrictInfos,
but I do not think that RestrictInfo ever appears in completed plans.)
Ok. I made patches replacing all of "#if FALSE" or "#if 0" to "#ifdef
NOT_USED" for current. I have tested these patches in that the
postgres binaries are identical.