$PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/backend/executor/README,v 1.5 2005/04/28 21:47:12 tgl Exp $ The Postgres Executor --------------------- The executor processes a tree of "plan nodes". The plan tree is essentially a demand-pull pipeline of tuple processing operations. Each node, when called, will produce the next tuple in its output sequence, or NULL if no more tuples are available. If the node is not a primitive relation-scanning node, it will have child node(s) that it calls in turn to obtain input tuples. Refinements on this basic model include: * Choice of scan direction (forwards or backwards). Caution: this is not currently well-supported. It works for primitive scan nodes, but not very well for joins, aggregates, etc. * Rescan command to reset a node and make it generate its output sequence over again. * Parameters that can alter a node's results. After adjusting a parameter, the rescan command must be applied to that node and all nodes above it. There is a moderately intelligent scheme to avoid rescanning nodes unnecessarily (for example, Sort does not rescan its input if no parameters of the input have changed, since it can just reread its stored sorted data). The plan tree concept implements SELECT directly: it is only necessary to deliver the top-level result tuples to the client, or insert them into another table in the case of INSERT ... SELECT. (INSERT ... VALUES is handled similarly, but the plan tree is just a Result node with no source tables.) For UPDATE, the plan tree selects the tuples that need to be updated (WHERE condition) and delivers a new calculated tuple value for each such tuple, plus a "junk" (hidden) tuple CTID identifying the target tuple. The executor's top level then uses this information to update the correct tuple. DELETE is similar to UPDATE except that only a CTID need be delivered by the plan tree. XXX a great deal more documentation needs to be written here... Plan Trees and State Trees -------------------------- The plan tree delivered by the planner contains a tree of Plan nodes (struct types derived from struct Plan). Each Plan node may have expression trees associated with it, to represent its target list, qualification conditions, etc. During executor startup we build a parallel tree of identical structure containing executor state nodes --- every plan and expression node type has a corresponding executor state node type. Each node in the state tree has a pointer to its corresponding node in the plan tree, plus executor state data as needed to implement that node type. This arrangement allows the plan tree to be completely read-only as far as the executor is concerned: all data that is modified during execution is in the state tree. Read-only plan trees make life much simpler for plan caching and reuse. Altogether there are four classes of nodes used in these trees: Plan nodes, their corresponding PlanState nodes, Expr nodes, and their corresponding ExprState nodes. (Actually, there are also List nodes, which are used as "glue" in all four kinds of tree.) Memory Management ----------------- A "per query" memory context is created during CreateExecutorState(); all storage allocated during an executor invocation is allocated in that context or a child context. This allows easy reclamation of storage during executor shutdown --- rather than messing with retail pfree's and probable storage leaks, we just destroy the memory context. In particular, the plan state trees and expression state trees described in the previous section are allocated in the per-query memory context. To avoid intra-query memory leaks, most processing while a query runs is done in "per tuple" memory contexts, which are so-called because they are typically reset to empty once per tuple. Per-tuple contexts are usually associated with ExprContexts, and commonly each PlanState node has its own ExprContext to evaluate its qual and targetlist expressions in. Query Processing Control Flow ----------------------------- This is a sketch of control flow for full query processing: CreateQueryDesc ExecutorStart CreateExecutorState creates per-query context switch to per-query context to run ExecInitNode ExecInitNode --- recursively scans plan tree CreateExprContext creates per-tuple context ExecInitExpr ExecutorRun ExecProcNode --- recursively called in per-query context ExecEvalExpr --- called in per-tuple context ResetExprContext --- to free memory ExecutorEnd ExecEndNode --- recursively releases resources FreeExecutorState frees per-query context and child contexts FreeQueryDesc Per above comments, it's not really critical for ExecEndNode to free any memory; it'll all go away in FreeExecutorState anyway. However, we do need to be careful to close relations, drop buffer pins, etc, so we do need to scan the plan state tree to find these sorts of resources. The executor can also be used to evaluate simple expressions without any Plan tree ("simple" meaning "no aggregates and no sub-selects", though such might be hidden inside function calls). This case has a flow of control like CreateExecutorState creates per-query context CreateExprContext -- or use GetPerTupleExprContext(estate) creates per-tuple context ExecPrepareExpr switch to per-query context to run ExecInitExpr ExecInitExpr Repeatedly do: ExecEvalExprSwitchContext ExecEvalExpr --- called in per-tuple context ResetExprContext --- to free memory FreeExecutorState frees per-query context, as well as ExprContext (a separate FreeExprContext call is not necessary) EvalPlanQual (READ COMMITTED update checking) --------------------------------------------- For simple SELECTs, the executor need only pay attention to tuples that are valid according to the snapshot seen by the current transaction (ie, they were inserted by a previously committed transaction, and not deleted by any previously committed transaction). However, for UPDATE and DELETE it is not cool to modify or delete a tuple that's been modified by an open or concurrently-committed transaction. If we are running in SERIALIZABLE isolation level then we just raise an error when this condition is seen to occur. In READ COMMITTED isolation level, we must work a lot harder. The basic idea in READ COMMITTED mode is to take the modified tuple committed by the concurrent transaction (after waiting for it to commit, if need be) and re-evaluate the query qualifications to see if it would still meet the quals. If so, we regenerate the updated tuple (if we are doing an UPDATE) from the modified tuple, and finally update/delete the modified tuple. SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE behaves similarly, except that its action is just to lock the modified tuple. To implement this checking, we actually re-run the entire query from scratch for each modified tuple, but with the scan node that sourced the original tuple set to return only the modified tuple, not the original tuple or any of the rest of the relation. If this query returns a tuple, then the modified tuple passes the quals (and the query output is the suitably modified update tuple, if we're doing UPDATE). If no tuple is returned, then the modified tuple fails the quals, so we ignore it and continue the original query. (This is reasonably efficient for simple queries, but may be horribly slow for joins. A better design would be nice; one thought for future investigation is to treat the tuple substitution like a parameter, so that we can avoid rescanning unrelated nodes.) Note a fundamental bogosity of this approach: if the relation containing the original tuple is being used in a self-join, the other instance(s) of the relation will be treated as still containing the original tuple, whereas logical consistency would demand that the modified tuple appear in them too. But we'd have to actually substitute the modified tuple for the original, while still returning all the rest of the relation, to ensure consistent answers. Implementing this correctly is a task for future work. In UPDATE/DELETE, only the target relation needs to be handled this way, so only one special recheck query needs to execute at a time. In SELECT FOR UPDATE, there may be multiple relations flagged FOR UPDATE, so it's possible that while we are executing a recheck query for one modified tuple, we will hit another modified tuple in another relation. In this case we "stack up" recheck queries: a sub-recheck query is spawned in which both the first and second modified tuples will be returned as the only components of their relations. (In event of success, all these modified tuples will be locked.) Again, this isn't necessarily quite the right thing ... but in simple cases it works. Potentially, recheck queries could get nested to the depth of the number of FOR UPDATE/SHARE relations in the query. It should be noted also that UPDATE/DELETE expect at most one tuple to result from the modified query, whereas in the FOR UPDATE case it's possible for multiple tuples to result (since we could be dealing with a join in which multiple tuples join to the modified tuple). We want FOR UPDATE to lock all relevant tuples, so we pass all tuples output by all the stacked recheck queries back to the executor toplevel for locking.