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Tomas Vondra 40d465cafc Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN
BRIN indexes did not properly distinguish between summaries for empty
(no rows) and all-NULL ranges, treating them as essentially the same
thing. Summaries were initialized with allnulls=true, and opclasses
simply reset allnulls to false when processing the first non-NULL value.
This however produces incorrect results if the range starts with a NULL
value (or a sequence of NULL values), in which case we forget the range
contains NULL values when adding the first non-NULL value.

This happens because the allnulls flag is used for two separate
purposes - to mark empty ranges (not representing any rows yet) and
ranges containing only NULL values.

Opclasses don't know which of these cases it is, and so don't know
whether to set hasnulls=true. Setting the flag in both cases would make
it correct, but it would also make BRIN indexes useless for queries with
IS NULL clauses. All ranges start empty (and thus allnulls=true), so all
ranges would end up with either allnulls=true or hasnulls=true.

The severity of the issue is somewhat reduced by the fact that it only
happens when adding values to an existing summary with allnulls=true.
This can happen e.g. for small tables (because a summary for the first
range exists for all BRIN indexes), or for tables with large fraction of
NULL values in the indexed columns.

Bulk summarization (e.g. during CREATE INDEX or automatic summarization)
that processes all values at once is not affected by this issue. In this
case the flags were updated in a slightly different way, not forgetting
the NULL values.

To identify empty ranges we use a new flag, stored in an unused bit in
the BRIN tuple header so the on-disk format remains the same. A matching
flag is added to BrinMemTuple, into a 3B gap after bt_placeholder.
That means there's no risk of ABI breakage, although we don't actually
pass the BrinMemTuple to any public API.

We could also skip storing index tuples for empty summaries, but then
we'd have to always process such ranges - even if there are no rows in
large parts of the table (e.g. after a bulk DELETE), it would still
require reading the pages etc. So we store them, but ignore them when
building the bitmap.

Backpatch to 11. The issue exists since BRIN indexes were introduced in
9.5, but older releases are already EOL.

Backpatch-through: 11
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby, Matthias van de Meent, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/402430e4-7d9d-6cf1-09ef-464d80afff3b@enterprisedb.com
2023-05-19 00:15:00 +02:00
config Use --strip-unneeded when stripping static libraries with GNU strip. 2023-04-20 18:12:32 -04:00
contrib Ensure Soundex difference() function handles empty input sanely. 2023-05-16 10:53:42 -04:00
doc Doc: Fix link to fillfactor reloption. 2023-05-10 10:49:46 -07:00
src Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN 2023-05-19 00:15:00 +02:00
.dir-locals.el Make Emacs perl-mode indent more like perltidy. 2019-01-13 11:32:31 -08:00
.editorconfig Add .editorconfig 2019-12-18 09:13:13 +01:00
.git-blame-ignore-revs Backpatch addition of .git-blame-ignore-revs 2022-08-05 19:36:24 +02:00
.gitattributes gitattributes: Add new entry to silence whitespace error 2021-06-05 07:57:31 +02:00
.gitignore Add portlock directory to .gitignore 2022-11-26 07:47:06 -05:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2023 2023-01-02 15:00:37 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Remove temporary portlock directory during make [dist]clean. 2022-11-26 10:30:53 -05:00
HISTORY Canonicalize some URLs 2020-02-10 20:47:50 +01:00
Makefile Don't unset MAKEFLAGS in non-GNU Makefile. 2019-06-25 09:36:21 +12:00
README Canonicalize some URLs 2020-02-10 20:47:50 +01:00
README.git Canonicalize some URLs 2020-02-10 20:47:50 +01:00
aclocal.m4 Probe $PROVE not $PERL while checking for modules needed by TAP tests. 2021-11-22 12:54:52 -05:00
configure Stamp 14.8. 2023-05-08 17:15:52 -04:00
configure.ac Stamp 14.8. 2023-05-08 17:15:52 -04:00

README

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
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and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	https://www.postgresql.org/download/

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
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