of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
returning a NULL pointer (some callers remembered to check the return
value, but some did not -- it is safer to just bail out).
Also, cleanup pgstat.c to use elog(ERROR) rather than elog(LOG) followed
by exit().
as well as the hash function (formerly the comparison function was hardwired
as memcmp()). This makes it possible to eliminate the special-purpose
hashtable management code in execGrouping.c in favor of using dynahash to
manage tuple hashtables; which is a win because dynahash knows how to expand
a hashtable when the original size estimate was too small, whereas the
special-purpose code was too stupid to do that. (See recent gripe from
Stephan Szabo about poor performance when hash table size estimate is way
off.) Free side benefit: when using string_hash, the default comparison
function is now strncmp() instead of memcmp(). This should eliminate some
part of the overhead associated with larger NAMEDATALEN values.
specific hash functions used by hash indexes, rather than the old
not-datatype-aware ComputeHashFunc routine. This makes it safe to do
hash joining on several datatypes that previously couldn't use hashing.
The sets of datatypes that are hash indexable and hash joinable are now
exactly the same, whereas before each had some that weren't in the other.
Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Daemon
Neil Conway
Bruce Momjian