The original implementation of TABLESAMPLE modeled the tablesample method
API on index access methods, which wasn't a good choice because, without
specialized DDL commands, there's no way to build an extension that can
implement a TSM. (Raw inserts into system catalogs are not an acceptable
thing to do, because we can't undo them during DROP EXTENSION, nor will
pg_upgrade behave sanely.) Instead adopt an API more like procedural
language handlers or foreign data wrappers, wherein the only SQL-level
support object needed is a single handler function identified by having
a special return type. This lets us get rid of the supporting catalog
altogether, so that no custom DDL support is needed for the feature.
Adjust the API so that it can support non-constant tablesample arguments
(the original coding assumed we could evaluate the argument expressions at
ExecInitSampleScan time, which is undesirable even if it weren't outright
unsafe), and discourage sampling methods from looking at invisible tuples.
Make sure that the BERNOULLI and SYSTEM methods are genuinely repeatable
within and across queries, as required by the SQL standard, and deal more
honestly with methods that can't support that requirement.
Make a full code-review pass over the tablesample additions, and fix
assorted bugs, omissions, infelicities, and cosmetic issues (such as
failure to put the added code stanzas in a consistent ordering).
Improve EXPLAIN's output of tablesample plans, too.
Back-patch to 9.5 so that we don't have to support the original API
in production.
Add a TABLESAMPLE clause to SELECT statements that allows
user to specify random BERNOULLI sampling or block level
SYSTEM sampling. Implementation allows for extensible
sampling functions to be written, using a standard API.
Basic version follows SQLStandard exactly. Usable
concrete use cases for the sampling API follow in later
commits.
Petr Jelinek
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Simon Riggs
">" should be ">>". This typo results in failure to use all of the bits
of the provided seed.
This might rise to the level of a security bug if we were relying on
srand48 for any security-critical purposes, but we are not --- in fact,
it's not used at all unless the platform lacks srandom(), which is
improbable. Even on such a platform the exposure seems minimal.
Reported privately by Andres Freund.
glibc renders random() thread-safe by wrapping a futex lock around it;
testing reveals that this limits the performance of pgbench on machines
with many CPU cores. Rather than switching to random_r(), which is
only available on GNU systems and crashes unless you use undocumented
alchemy to initialize the random state properly, switch to our built-in
implementation of erand48(), which is both thread-safe and concurrent.
Since the list of reasons not to use the operating system's erand48()
is getting rather long, rename ours to pg_erand48() (and similarly
for our implementations of lrand48() and srand48()) and just always
use those. We were already doing this on Cygwin anyway, and the
glibc implementation is not quite thread-safe, so pgbench wouldn't
be able to use that either.
Per discussion with Tom Lane.
and extend configure to test for it properly instead of hard-wiring
an assumption that everybody but Windows has the rand48 functions.
(We do cheat to the extent of assuming that probing for erand48 will do
for the entire rand48 family.)
erand48() is unused as of this commit, but a followon patch will cause
GEQO to depend on it.
Andres Freund, additional hacking by Tom
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander