The conventions specified by the GiST SGML documentation were widely
ignored. For example, the strategy-number argument for "consistent" and
"distance" functions is specified to be a smallint, but most of the
built-in support functions declared it as an integer, and for that matter
the core code passed it using Int32GetDatum not Int16GetDatum. None of
that makes any real difference at runtime, but it's quite confusing for
newcomers to the code, and it makes it very hard to write an amvalidate()
function that checks support function signatures. So let's try to instill
some consistency here.
Another similar issue is that the "query" argument is not of a single
well-defined type, but could have different types depending on the strategy
(corresponding to search operators with different righthand-side argument
types). Some of the functions threw up their hands and declared the query
argument as being of "internal" type, which surely isn't right ("any" would
have been more appropriate); but the majority position seemed to be to
declare it as being of the indexed data type, corresponding to a search
operator with both input types the same. So I've specified a convention
that that's what to do always.
Also, the result of the "union" support function actually must be of the
index's storage type, but the documentation suggested declaring it to
return "internal", and some of the functions followed that. Standardize
on telling the truth, instead.
Similarly, standardize on declaring the "same" function's inputs as
being of the storage type, not "internal".
Also, somebody had forgotten to add the "recheck" argument to both
the documentation of the "distance" support function and all of their
SQL declarations, even though the C code was happily using that argument.
Clean that up too.
Fix up some other omissions in the docs too, such as documenting that
union's second input argument is vestigial.
So far as the errors in core function declarations go, we can just fix
pg_proc.h and bump catversion. Adjusting the erroneous declarations in
contrib modules is more debatable: in principle any change in those
scripts should involve an extension version bump, which is a pain.
However, since these changes are purely cosmetic and make no functional
difference, I think we can get away without doing that.
Remove a bunch of "extern Datum foo(PG_FUNCTION_ARGS);" declarations that
are no longer needed now that PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1(foo) provides that.
Some of these were evidently missed in commit e7128e8dbb, but others
were cargo-culted in in code added since then. Possibly that can be blamed
in part on the fact that we'd not fixed relevant documentation examples,
which I've now done.
Fix confusion in documentation, substantial memory leakage if float8 or
float4 are pass-by-reference, and assorted comments that were obsoleted
by commit 98edd617f3.
We can only support a lossy distance function when the distance function's
datatype is comparable with the original ordering operator's datatype.
The distance function always returns a float8, so we are limited to float8,
and float4 (by a hard-coded cast of the float8 to float4).
In light of this limitation, it seems like a good idea to have a separate
'recheck' flag for the ORDER BY expressions, so that if you have a non-lossy
distance function, it still works with lossy quals. There are cases like
that with the build-in or contrib opclasses, but it's plausible.
There was a hidden assumption that the ORDER BY values returned by GiST
match the original ordering operator's return type, but there are plenty
of examples where that's not true, e.g. in btree_gist and pg_trgm. As long
as the distance function is not lossy, we can tolerate that and just not
return the distance to the executor (or rather, always return NULL). The
executor doesn't need the distances if there are no lossy results.
There was another little bug: the recheck variable was not initialized
before calling the distance function. That revealed the bigger issue,
as the executor tried to reorder tuples that didn't need reordering, and
that failed because of the datatype mismatch.
The distance function can now set *recheck = false, like index quals. The
executor will then re-check the ORDER BY expressions, and use a queue to
reorder the results on the fly.
This makes it possible to do kNN-searches on polygons and circles, which
don't store the exact value in the index, but just a bounding box.
Alexander Korotkov and me
This adds a new GiST opclass method, 'fetch', which is used to reconstruct
the original Datum from the value stored in the index. Also, the 'canreturn'
index AM interface function gains a new 'attno' argument. That makes it
possible to use index-only scans on a multi-column index where some of the
opclasses support index-only scans but some do not.
This patch adds support in the box and point opclasses. Other opclasses
can added later as follow-on patches (btree_gist would be particularly
interesting).
Anastasia Lubennikova, with additional fixes and modifications by me.
gist_poly_compress() and gist_circle_compress() checked for a NULL-pointer
key argument, but that was dead code; the gist code never passes a
NULL-pointer to the "compress" method.
This commit also removes a documentation note added in commit a0a3883,
about doing NULL-pointer checks in the "compress" method. It was added
based on the fact that some implementations were doing NULL-pointer
checks, but those checks were unnecessary in the first place.
The NULL-pointer check in gbt_var_same() function was also unnecessary.
The arguments to the "same" method come from the "compress", "union", or
"picksplit" methods, but none of them return a NULL pointer.
None of this is to be confused with SQL NULL values. Those are dealt with
by the gist machinery, and are never passed to the GiST opclass methods.
Michael Paquier
Previously the maximum size of GIN pending list was controlled only by
work_mem. But the reasonable value of work_mem and the reasonable size
of the list are basically not the same, so it was not appropriate to
control both of them by only one GUC, i.e., work_mem. This commit
separates new GUC, pending_list_cleanup_size, from work_mem to allow
users to control only the size of the list.
Also this commit adds pending_list_cleanup_size as new storage parameter
to allow users to specify the size of the list per index. This is useful,
for example, when users want to increase the size of the list only for
the GIN index which can be updated heavily, and decrease it otherwise.
Reviewed by Etsuro Fujita.
This operator class can accelerate subnet/supernet tests as well as
btree-equivalent ordered comparisons. It also handles a new network
operator inet && inet (overlaps, a/k/a "is supernet or subnet of"),
which is expected to be useful in exclusion constraints.
Ideally this opclass would be the default for GiST with inet/cidr data,
but we can't mark it that way until we figure out how to do a more or
less graceful transition from the current situation, in which the
really-completely-bogus inet/cidr opclasses in contrib/btree_gist are
marked as default. Having the opclass in core and not default is better
than not having it at all, though.
While at it, add new documentation sections to allow us to officially
document GiST/GIN/SP-GiST opclasses, something there was never a clear
place to do before. I filled these in with some simple tables listing
the existing opclasses and the operators they support, but there's
certainly scope to put more information there.
Emre Hasegeli, reviewed by Andreas Karlsson, further hacking by me
pg_trgm was already doing this unofficially, but the implementation hadn't
been thought through very well and leaked memory. Restructure the core
GiST code so that it actually works, and document it. Ordinarily this
would have required an extra memory context creation/destruction for each
GiST index search, but I was able to avoid that in the normal case of a
non-rescanned search by finessing the handling of the RBTree. It used to
have its own context always, but now shares a context with the
scan-lifespan data structures, unless there is more than one rescan call.
This should make the added overhead unnoticeable in typical cases.
When building a GiST index that doesn't fit in cache, buffers are attached
to some internal nodes in the index. This speeds up the build by avoiding
random I/O that would otherwise be needed to traverse all the way down the
tree to the find right leaf page for tuple.
Alexander Korotkov
Apparently sane-looking penalty code might return small negative values,
for example because of roundoff error. This will confuse places like
gistchoose(). Prevent problems by clamping negative penalty values to
zero. (Just to be really sure, I also made it force NaNs to zero.)
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Alexander Korotkov
cleanup stage to finish incomplete inserts or splits anymore. There was two
reasons for the cleanup step:
1. When a new tuple was inserted to a leaf page, the downlink in the parent
needed to be updated to contain (ie. to be consistent with) the new key.
Updating the parent in turn might require recursively updating the parent of
the parent. We now handle that by updating the parent while traversing down
the tree, so that when we insert the leaf tuple, all the parents are already
consistent with the new key, and the tree is consistent at every step.
2. When a page is split, we need to insert the downlink for the new right
page(s), and update the downlink for the original page to not include keys
that moved to the right page(s). We now handle that by setting a new flag,
F_FOLLOW_RIGHT, on the non-rightmost pages in the split. When that flag is
set, scans always follow the rightlink, regardless of the NSN mechanism used
to detect concurrent page splits. That way the tree is consistent right after
split, even though the downlink is still missing. This is very similar to the
way B-tree splits are handled. When the downlink is inserted in the parent,
the flag is cleared. To keep the insertion algorithm simple, when an
insertion sees an incomplete split, indicated by the F_FOLLOW_RIGHT flag, it
finishes the split before doing anything else.
These changes allow removing the whole "invalid tuple" mechanism, but I
retained the scan code to still follow invalid tuples correctly. While we
don't create any such tuples anymore, we want to handle them gracefully in
case you pg_upgrade a GiST index that has them. If we encounter any on an
insert, though, we just throw an error saying that you need to REINDEX.
The issue that got me into doing this is that if you did a checkpoint while
an insert or split was in progress, and the checkpoint finishes quickly so
that there is no WAL record related to the insert between RedoRecPtr and the
checkpoint record, recovery from that checkpoint would not know to finish
the incomplete insert. IOW, we have the same issue we solved with the
rm_safe_restartpoint mechanism during normal operation too. It's highly
unlikely to happen in practice, and this fix is far too large to backpatch,
so we're just going to live with in previous versions, but this refactoring
fixes it going forward.
With this patch, you don't get the annoying
'index "FOO" needs VACUUM or REINDEX to finish crash recovery' notices
anymore if you crash at an unfortunate moment.
"consistent" functions, and remove pg_amop.opreqcheck, as per recent
discussion. The main immediate benefit of this is that we no longer need
8.3's ugly hack of requiring @@@ rather than @@ to test weight-using tsquery
searches on GIN indexes. In future it should be possible to optimize some
other queries better than is done now, by detecting at runtime whether the
index match is exact or not.
Tom Lane, after an idea of Heikki's, and with some help from Teodor.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
documenting GiST crash recovery procedures, as requested some time ago
by Teodor. (The GiST chapter doesn't seem quite the right place for
the latter, but I'm not sure what else to do with it.)
- make sure we always invoke user-supplied GiST methods in a short-lived
memory context. This means the backend isn't exposed to any memory leaks
that be in those methods (in fact, it is probably a net loss for most
GiST methods to bother manually freeing memory now). This also means
we can do away with a lot of ugly manual memory management in the
GiST code itself.
- keep the current page of a GiST index scan pinned, rather than doing a
ReadBuffer() for each tuple produced by the scan. Since ReadBuffer() is
expensive, this is a perf. win
- implement dead tuple killing for GiST indexes (which is easy to do, now
that we keep a pin on the current scan page). Now all the builtin indexes
implement dead tuple killing.
- cleanup a lot of ugly code in GiST
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas
Fujii Masao
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart