This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
The speed gains primarily come from:
- non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
- simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
function calls
- sharing some state between different sub-expressions
- reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
nearly all of the previously used linked lists
- more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
constant re-checks at evaluation time
Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
- basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
statements. That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
initialization overhead is measurable.
- optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
work has already been made.
- optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
been made here too.
The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
backward-incompatible changes:
- Function permission checks are now done during expression
initialization, whereas previously they were done during
execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
different array type previously didn't perform checks.
- The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer. The behavior
around might still change.
Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
changes by Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
This is expected to be useful mostly when performing such scans in
parallel, because in that case it allows (in combination with commit
acf555bc53) nodes below a Gather to get
control just before the DSM segment goes away.
KaiGai Kohei, except that I rewrote the documentation. Reviewed by
Claudio Freire.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CADyhKSXJK0jUJ8rWv4AmKDhsUh124_rEn39eqgfC5D8fu6xVuw@mail.gmail.com
Since 69f4b9c plain expression evaluation (and thus normal projection)
can't return sets of tuples anymore. Thus remove code dealing with
that possibility.
This will require adjustments in external code using
ExecEvalExpr()/ExecProject() - that should neither be hard nor very
common.
Author: Andres Freund and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160822214023.aaxz5l4igypowyri@alap3.anarazel.de
This patch doesn't put the new infrastructure to use anywhere, and
indeed it's not clear how it could ever be used for something like
postgres_fdw which has to send an SQL query and wait for a reply,
but there might be FDWs or custom scan providers that are CPU-bound,
so let's give them a way to join club parallel.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by me.
Commit e7cb7ee145 included some design
decisions that seem pretty questionable to me, and there was quite a lot
of stuff not to like about the documentation and comments. Clean up
as follows:
* Consider foreign joins only between foreign tables on the same server,
rather than between any two foreign tables with the same underlying FDW
handler function. In most if not all cases, the FDW would simply have had
to apply the same-server restriction itself (far more expensively, both for
lack of caching and because it would be repeated for each combination of
input sub-joins), or else risk nasty bugs. Anyone who's really intent on
doing something outside this restriction can always use the
set_join_pathlist_hook.
* Rename fdw_ps_tlist/custom_ps_tlist to fdw_scan_tlist/custom_scan_tlist
to better reflect what they're for, and allow these custom scan tlists
to be used even for base relations.
* Change make_foreignscan() API to include passing the fdw_scan_tlist
value, since the FDW is required to set that. Backwards compatibility
doesn't seem like an adequate reason to expect FDWs to set it in some
ad-hoc extra step, and anyway existing FDWs can just pass NIL.
* Change the API of path-generating subroutines of add_paths_to_joinrel,
and in particular that of GetForeignJoinPaths and set_join_pathlist_hook,
so that various less-used parameters are passed in a struct rather than
as separate parameter-list entries. The objective here is to reduce the
probability that future additions to those parameter lists will result in
source-level API breaks for users of these hooks. It's possible that this
is even a small win for the core code, since most CPU architectures can't
pass more than half a dozen parameters efficiently anyway. I kept root,
joinrel, outerrel, innerrel, and jointype as separate parameters to reduce
code churn in joinpath.c --- in particular, putting jointype into the
struct would have been problematic because of the subroutines' habit of
changing their local copies of that variable.
* Avoid ad-hocery in ExecAssignScanProjectionInfo. It was probably all
right for it to know about IndexOnlyScan, but if the list is to grow
we should refactor the knowledge out to the callers.
* Restore nodeForeignscan.c's previous use of the relcache to avoid
extra GetFdwRoutine lookups for base-relation scans.
* Lots of cleanup of documentation and missed comments. Re-order some
code additions into more logical places.
Foreign data wrappers can use this capability for so-called "join
pushdown"; that is, instead of executing two separate foreign scans
and then joining the results locally, they can generate a path which
performs the join on the remote server and then is scanned locally.
This commit does not extend postgres_fdw to take advantage of this
capability; it just provides the infrastructure.
Custom scan providers can use this in a similar way. Previously,
it was only possible for a custom scan provider to scan a single
relation. Now, it can scan an entire join tree, provided of course
that it knows how to produce the same results that the join would
have produced if executed normally.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat, and me.
This allows extension modules to define their own methods for
scanning a relation, and get the core code to use them. It's
unclear as yet how much use this capability will find, but we
won't find out if we never commit it.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed at various times and in various levels
of detail by Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Álvaro
Herrera, and myself.
Andres Freund
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane