postgresql/src
Tomas Vondra e187693239 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 00:15:13 +02:00
..
backend Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN 2023-05-19 00:15:13 +02:00
bin Tighten usage of PSQL_WATCH_PAGER. 2023-05-12 16:11:14 -04:00
common Fix JSON error reporting for many cases of erroneous string values. 2023-03-13 15:19:00 -04:00
fe_utils Use correct connection for cancellation in frontend's parallel slots 2022-08-27 15:22:07 +09:00
include Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN 2023-05-19 00:15:13 +02:00
interfaces Translation updates 2023-05-08 14:29:57 +02:00
makefiles Refactor DLSUFFIX handling 2022-03-25 08:56:02 +01:00
pl Translation updates 2023-05-08 14:29:57 +02:00
port Fix detection of unseekable files for fseek() and ftello() with MSVC 2023-04-12 09:09:53 +09:00
template On NetBSD, force dynamic symbol resolution at postmaster start. 2022-08-30 17:28:55 -04:00
test Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN 2023-05-19 00:15:13 +02:00
timezone Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2023c. 2023-04-18 14:46:39 -04:00
tools Fix detection of unseekable files for fseek() and ftello() with MSVC 2023-04-12 09:09:53 +09:00
tutorial Doc: sync src/tutorial/basics.source with SGML documentation. 2022-11-19 13:09:14 -05:00
.gitignore
DEVELOPERS
Makefile Remove the option to build thread_test.c outside configure. 2020-10-21 12:08:48 -04:00
Makefile.global.in Fix prove_installcheck when used with PGXS 2023-05-05 07:10:15 +02:00
Makefile.shlib AIX: Fix missing libpq symbols by respecting SHLIB_EXPORTS. 2021-09-06 11:27:59 -07:00
nls-global.mk Improve frontend error logging style. 2022-04-08 14:55:14 -04:00