Historically we've always materialized the full output of a CTE query,
treating WITH as an optimization fence (so that, for example, restrictions
from the outer query cannot be pushed into it). This is appropriate when
the CTE query is INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE, or is recursive; but when the CTE
query is non-recursive and side-effect-free, there's no hazard of changing
the query results by pushing restrictions down.
Another argument for materialization is that it can avoid duplicate
computation of an expensive WITH query --- but that only applies if
the WITH query is called more than once in the outer query. Even then
it could still be a net loss, if each call has restrictions that
would allow just a small part of the WITH query to be computed.
Hence, let's change the behavior for WITH queries that are non-recursive
and side-effect-free. By default, we will inline them into the outer
query (removing the optimization fence) if they are called just once.
If they are called more than once, we will keep the old behavior by
default, but the user can override this and force inlining by specifying
NOT MATERIALIZED. Lastly, the user can force the old behavior by
specifying MATERIALIZED; this would mainly be useful when the query had
deliberately been employing WITH as an optimization fence to prevent a
poor choice of plan.
Andreas Karlsson, Andrew Gierth, David Fetter
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/87sh48ffhb.fsf@news-spur.riddles.org.uk
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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