The core innovation of this patch is the introduction of the concept
of a partial path; that is, a path which if executed in parallel will
generate a subset of the output rows in each process. Gathering a
partial path produces an ordinary (complete) path. This allows us to
generate paths for parallel joins by joining a partial path for one
side (which at the baserel level is currently always a Partial Seq
Scan) to an ordinary path on the other side. This is subject to
various restrictions at present, especially that this strategy seems
unlikely to be sensible for merge joins, so only nested loops and
hash joins paths are generated.
This also allows an Append node to be pushed below a Gather node in
the case of a partitioned table.
Testing revealed that early versions of this patch made poor decisions
in some cases, which turned out to be caused by the fact that the
original cost model for Parallel Seq Scan wasn't very good. So this
patch tries to make some modest improvements in that area.
There is much more to be done in the area of generating good parallel
plans in all cases, but this seems like a useful step forward.
Patch by me, reviewed by Dilip Kumar and Amit Kapila.
I originally modeled this data structure on SpecialJoinInfo, but after
commit acfcd45cac that looks like a pretty poor decision.
All we really need is relid sets identifying laterally-referenced rels;
and most of the time, what we want to know about includes indirect lateral
references, a case the LateralJoinInfo data was unsuited to compute with
any efficiency. The previous commit redefined RelOptInfo.lateral_relids
as the transitive closure of lateral references, so that it easily supports
checking indirect references. For the places where we really do want just
direct references, add a new RelOptInfo field direct_lateral_relids, which
is easily set up as a copy of lateral_relids before we perform the
transitive closure calculation. Then we can just drop lateral_info_list
and LateralJoinInfo and the supporting code. This makes the planner's
handling of lateral references noticeably more efficient, and shorter too.
Such a change can't be back-patched into stable branches for fear of
breaking extensions that might be looking at the planner's data structures;
but it seems not too late to push it into 9.5, so I've done so.
More fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich exposed that the planner did not
cope well with chains of lateral references. If relation X references Y
laterally, and Y references Z laterally, then we will have to scan X on the
inside of a nestloop with Z, so for all intents and purposes X is laterally
dependent on Z too. The planner did not understand this and would generate
intermediate joins that could not be used. While that was usually harmless
except for wasting some planning cycles, under the right circumstances it
would lead to "failed to build any N-way joins" or "could not devise a
query plan" planner failures.
To fix that, convert the existing per-relation lateral_relids and
lateral_referencers relid sets into their transitive closures; that is,
they now show all relations on which a rel is directly or indirectly
laterally dependent. This not only fixes the chained-reference problem
but allows some of the relevant tests to be made substantially simpler
and faster, since they can be reduced to simple bitmap manipulations
instead of searches of the LateralJoinInfo list.
Also, when a PlaceHolderVar that is due to be evaluated at a join contains
lateral references, we should treat those references as indirect lateral
dependencies of each of the join's base relations. This prevents us from
trying to join any individual base relations to the lateral reference
source before the join is formed, which again cannot work.
Andreas' testing also exposed another oversight in the "dangerous
PlaceHolderVar" test added in commit 85e5e222b1. Simply rejecting
unsafe join paths in joinpath.c is insufficient, because in some cases
we will end up rejecting *all* possible paths for a particular join, again
leading to "could not devise a query plan" failures. The restriction has
to be known also to join_is_legal and its cohort functions, so that they
will not select a join for which that will happen. I chose to move the
supporting logic into joinrels.c where the latter functions are.
Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL support was introduced.
It was possible for the planner to decide to join a LATERAL subquery to
the outer side of an outer join before the outer join itself is completed.
Normally that's fine because of the associativity rules, but it doesn't
work if the subquery contains a lateral reference to the inner side of the
outer join. In such a situation the outer join *must* be done first.
join_is_legal() missed this consideration and would allow the join to be
attempted, but the actual path-building code correctly decided that no
valid join path could be made, sometimes leading to planner errors such as
"failed to build any N-way joins".
Per report from Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL
support was added.
One of the changes I made in commit 8703059c6b turns out not to have
been such a good idea: we still need the exception in join_is_legal() that
allows a join if both inputs already overlap the RHS of the special join
we're checking. Otherwise we can miss valid plans, and might indeed fail
to find a plan at all, as in recent report from Andreas Seltenreich.
That code was added way back in commit c17117649b, but I failed to
include a regression test case then; my bad. Put it back with a better
explanation, and a test this time. The logic does end up a bit different
than before though: I now believe it's appropriate to make this check
first, thereby allowing such a case whether or not we'd consider the
previous SJ(s) to commute with this one. (Presumably, we already decided
they did; but it was confusing to have this consideration in the middle
of the code that was handling the other case.)
Back-patch to all active branches, like the previous patch.
Further testing revealed that commit f69b4b9495 was still a few
bricks shy of a load: minor tweaking of the previous test cases resulted
in the same wrong-outer-join-order problem coming back. After study
I concluded that my previous changes in make_outerjoininfo() were just
accidentally masking the problem, and should be reverted in favor of
forcing syntactic join order whenever an upper outer join's predicate
doesn't mention a lower outer join's LHS. This still allows the
chained-outer-joins style that is the normally optimizable case.
I also tightened things up some more in join_is_legal(). It seems to me
on review that what's really happening in the exception case where we
ignore a mismatched special join is that we're allowing the proposed join
to associate into the RHS of the outer join we're comparing it to. As
such, we should *always* insist that the proposed join be a left join,
which eliminates a bunch of rather dubious argumentation. The case where
we weren't enforcing that was the one that was already known buggy anyway
(it had a violatable Assert before the aforesaid commit) so it hardly
deserves a lot of deference.
Back-patch to all active branches, like the previous patch. The added
regression test case failed in all branches back to 9.1, and I think it's
only an unrelated change in costing calculations that kept 9.0 from
choosing a broken plan.
Per the discussion in optimizer/README, it's unsafe to reassociate anything
into or out of the RHS of a SEMI or ANTI join. An example from Piotr
Stefaniak showed that join_is_legal() wasn't sufficiently enforcing this
rule, so lock it down a little harder.
I couldn't find a reasonably simple example of the optimizer trying to
do this, so no new regression test. (Piotr's example involved the random
search in GEQO accidentally trying an invalid case and triggering a sanity
check way downstream in clause selectivity estimation, which did not seem
like a sequence of events that would be useful to memorialize in a
regression test as-is.)
Back-patch to all active branches.
An outer join clause that didn't actually reference the RHS (perhaps only
after constant-folding) could confuse the join order enforcement logic,
leading to wrong query results. Also, nested occurrences of such things
could trigger an Assertion that on reflection seems incorrect.
Per fuzz testing by Andreas Seltenreich. The practical use of such cases
seems thin enough that it's not too surprising we've not heard field
reports about it.
This has been broken for a long time, so back-patch to all active branches.
In many cases, we can implement a semijoin as a plain innerjoin by first
passing the righthand-side relation through a unique-ification step.
However, one of the cases where this does NOT work is where the RHS has
a LATERAL reference to the LHS; that makes the RHS dependent on the LHS
so that unique-ification is meaningless. joinpath.c understood this,
and so would not generate any join paths of this kind ... but join_is_legal
neglected to check for the case, so it would think that we could do it.
The upshot would be a "could not devise a query plan for the given query"
failure once we had failed to generate any join paths at all for the bogus
join pair.
Back-patch to 9.3 where LATERAL was added.
If we have a semijoin, say
SELECT * FROM x WHERE x1 IN (SELECT y1 FROM y)
and we're estimating the cost of a parameterized indexscan on x, the number
of repetitions of the indexscan should not be taken as the size of y; it'll
really only be the number of distinct values of y1, because the only valid
plan with y on the outside of a nestloop would require y to be unique-ified
before joining it to x. Most of the time this doesn't make that much
difference, but sometimes it can lead to drastically underestimating the
cost of the indexscan and hence choosing a bad plan, as pointed out by
David Kubečka.
Fixing this is a bit difficult because parameterized indexscans are costed
out quite early in the planning process, before we have the information
that would be needed to call estimate_num_groups() and thereby estimate the
number of distinct values of the join column(s). However we can move the
code that extracts a semijoin RHS's unique-ification columns, so that it's
done in initsplan.c rather than on-the-fly in create_unique_path(). That
shouldn't make any difference speed-wise and it's really a bit cleaner too.
The other bit of information we need is the size of the semijoin RHS,
which is easy if it's a single relation (we make those estimates before
considering indexscan costs) but problematic if it's a join relation.
The solution adopted here is just to use the product of the sizes of the
join component rels. That will generally be an overestimate, but since
estimate_num_groups() only uses this input as a clamp, an overestimate
shouldn't hurt us too badly. In any case we don't allow this new logic
to produce a value larger than we would have chosen before, so that at
worst an overestimate leaves us no wiser than we were before.
The planner largely failed to consider the possibility that a
PlaceHolderVar's expression might contain a lateral reference to a Var
coming from somewhere outside the PHV's syntactic scope. We had a previous
report of a problem in this area, which I tried to fix in a quick-hack way
in commit 4da6439bd8, but Antonin Houska
pointed out that there were still some problems, and investigation turned
up other issues. This patch largely reverts that commit in favor of a more
thoroughly thought-through solution. The new theory is that a PHV's
ph_eval_at level cannot be higher than its original syntactic level. If it
contains lateral references, those don't change the ph_eval_at level, but
rather they create a lateral-reference requirement for the ph_eval_at join
relation. The code in joinpath.c needs to handle that.
Another issue is that createplan.c wasn't handling nested PlaceHolderVars
properly.
In passing, push knowledge of lateral-reference checks for join clauses
into join_clause_is_movable_to. This is mainly so that FDWs don't need
to deal with it.
This patch doesn't fix the original join-qual-placement problem reported by
Jeremy Evans (and indeed, one of the new regression test cases shows the
wrong answer because of that). But the PlaceHolderVar problems need to be
fixed before that issue can be addressed, so committing this separately
seems reasonable.
This patch takes care of a number of problems having to do with failure
to choose valid join orders and incorrect handling of lateral references
pulled up from subqueries. Notable changes:
* Add a LateralJoinInfo data structure similar to SpecialJoinInfo, to
represent join ordering constraints created by lateral references.
(I first considered extending the SpecialJoinInfo structure, but the
semantics are different enough that a separate data structure seems
better.) Extend join_is_legal() and related functions to prevent trying
to form unworkable joins, and to ensure that we will consider joins that
satisfy lateral references even if the joins would be clauseless.
* Fill in the infrastructure needed for the last few types of relation scan
paths to support parameterization. We'd have wanted this eventually
anyway, but it is necessary now because a relation that gets pulled up out
of a UNION ALL subquery may acquire a reltargetlist containing lateral
references, meaning that its paths *have* to be parameterized whether or
not we have any code that can push join quals down into the scan.
* Compute data about lateral references early in query_planner(), and save
in RelOptInfo nodes, to avoid repetitive calculations later.
* Assorted corner-case bug fixes.
There's probably still some bugs left, but this is a lot closer to being
real than it was before.
This essentially reverts commit e54b10a62d,
in which I'd decided that the "last ditch" join logic was useless. The
folly of that is now exposed by a report from Pavel Stehule: although the
function should always find at least one join in a self-contained join
problem, it can still fail to do so in a sub-problem created by artificial
from_collapse_limit or join_collapse_limit constraints. Adjust the
comments to describe this, and simplify the code a bit to match the new
coding of the earlier loop in the function.
I'm not terribly happy about this: I still subscribe to the opinion stated
in the previous commit message that the "last ditch" code can obscure logic
bugs elsewhere. But the alternative seems to be to complicate the earlier
tests for does-this-relation-have-a-join-clause to the point where they can
tell whether the join clauses link outside the current join sub-problem.
And that looks messy, slow, and possibly a source of bugs in itself.
In any case, now is not the time to be inserting experimental code into
9.2, so let's just go back to the time-tested solution.
For an initial relation that lacks any join clauses (that is, it has to be
cartesian-product-joined to the rest of the query), we considered only
cartesian joins with initial rels appearing later in the initial-relations
list. This creates an undesirable dependency on FROM-list order. We would
never fail to find a plan, but perhaps we might not find the best available
plan. Noted while discussing the logic with Amit Kapila.
Improve the comments a bit in this area, too.
Arguably this is a bug fix, but given the lack of complaints from the
field I'll refrain from back-patching.
This patch adjusts the treatment of parameterized paths so that all paths
with the same parameterization (same set of required outer rels) for the
same relation will have the same rowcount estimate. We cache the rowcount
estimates to ensure that property, and hopefully save a few cycles too.
Doing this makes it practical for add_path_precheck to operate without
a rowcount estimate: it need only assume that paths with different
parameterizations never dominate each other, which is close enough to
true anyway for coarse filtering, because normally a more-parameterized
path should yield fewer rows thanks to having more join clauses to apply.
In add_path, we do the full nine yards of comparing rowcount estimates
along with everything else, so that we can discard parameterized paths that
don't actually have an advantage. This fixes some issues I'd found with
add_path rejecting parameterized paths on the grounds that they were more
expensive than not-parameterized ones, even though they yielded many fewer
rows and hence would be cheaper once subsequent joining was considered.
To make the same-rowcounts assumption valid, we have to require that any
parameterized path enforce *all* join clauses that could be obtained from
the particular set of outer rels, even if not all of them are useful for
indexing. This is required at both base scans and joins. It's a good
thing anyway since the net impact is that join quals are checked at the
lowest practical level in the join tree. Hence, discard the original
rather ad-hoc mechanism for choosing parameterization joinquals, and build
a better one that has a more principled rule for when clauses can be moved.
The original rule was actually buggy anyway for lack of knowledge about
which relations are part of an outer join's outer side; getting this right
requires adding an outer_relids field to RestrictInfo.
So far as I can tell, it is no longer possible for this heuristic to do
anything useful, because the new weaker definition of
have_relevant_joinclause means that any relation with a joinclause must be
considered joinable to at least one other relation. It would still be
possible for the code block to be entered, for example if there are join
order restrictions that prevent any join of the current level from being
formed; but in that case it's just a waste of cycles to attempt to form
cartesian joins, since the restrictions will still apply.
Furthermore, IMO the existence of this code path can mask bugs elsewhere;
we would have noticed the problem with cartesian joins a lot sooner if
this code hadn't compensated for it in the simplest case.
Accordingly, let's remove it and see what happens. I'm committing this
separately from the prerequisite changes in have_relevant_joinclause,
just to make the question easier to revisit if there is some fault in
my logic.
We should be willing to cross-join two small relations if that allows us
to use an inner indexscan on a large relation (that is, the potential
indexqual for the large table requires both smaller relations). This
worked in simple cases but fell apart as soon as there was a join clause
to a fourth relation, because the existence of any two-relation join clause
caused the planner to not consider clauseless joins between other base
relations. The added regression test shows an example case adapted from
a recent complaint from Benoit Delbosc.
Adjust have_relevant_joinclause, have_relevant_eclass_joinclause, and
has_relevant_eclass_joinclause to consider that a join clause mentioning
three or more relations is sufficient grounds for joining any subset of
those relations, even if we have to do so via a cartesian join. Since such
clauses are relatively uncommon, this shouldn't affect planning speed on
typical queries; in fact it should help a bit, because the latter two
functions in particular get significantly simpler.
Although this is arguably a bug fix, I'm not going to risk back-patching
it, since it might have currently-unforeseen consequences.
This patch fixes the planner so that it can generate nestloop-with-
inner-indexscan plans even with one or more levels of joining between
the indexscan and the nestloop join that is supplying the parameter.
The executor was fixed to handle such cases some time ago, but the
planner was not ready. This should improve our plans in many situations
where join ordering restrictions formerly forced complete table scans.
There is probably a fair amount of tuning work yet to be done, because
of various heuristics that have been added to limit the number of
parameterized paths considered. However, we are not going to find out
what needs to be adjusted until the code gets some real-world use, so
it's time to get it in there where it can be tested easily.
Note API change for index AM amcostestimate functions. I'm not aware of
any non-core index AMs, but if there are any, they will need minor
adjustments.
When we are doing GEQO join planning, the current memory context is a
short-lived context that will be reset at the end of geqo_eval(). However,
the RelOptInfos for base relations are set up before that and then re-used
across many GEQO cycles. Hence, any code that modifies a baserel during
join planning has to be careful not to put pointers to the short-lived
context into the baserel struct. mark_dummy_rel got this wrong, leading to
easy-to-reproduce-once-you-know-how crashes in 8.4, as reported off-list by
Leo Carson of SDSC. Some improvements made in 9.0 make it difficult to
demonstrate the crash in 9.0 or HEAD; but there's no doubt that there's
still a risk factor here, so patch all branches that have the function.
(Note: 8.3 has a similar function, but it's only applied to joinrels and
thus is not a hazard.)
This is advantageous first because it allows us to hash the smaller table
regardless of the outer-join type, and second because hash join can be more
flexible than merge join in dealing with arbitrary join quals in a FULL
join. For merge join all the join quals have to be mergejoinable, but hash
join will work so long as there's at least one hashjoinable qual --- the
others can be any condition. (This is true essentially because we don't
keep per-inner-tuple match flags in merge join, while hash join can do so.)
To do this, we need a has-it-been-matched flag for each tuple in the
hashtable, not just one for the current outer tuple. The key idea that
makes this practical is that we can store the match flag in the tuple's
infomask, since there are lots of bits there that are of no interest for a
MinimalTuple. So we aren't increasing the size of the hashtable at all for
the feature.
To write this without turning the hash code into even more of a pile of
spaghetti than it already was, I rewrote ExecHashJoin in a state-machine
style, similar to ExecMergeJoin. Other than that decision, it was pretty
straightforward.
In these cases a qual can get marked with the removable rel in its
required_relids, but this is just to schedule its evaluation correctly, not
because it really depends on the rel. We were assuming that, in effect,
we could throw away *all* quals so marked, which is nonsense. Tighten up
the logic to be a little more paranoid about which quals belong to the
outer join being considered for removal, and arrange for all quals that
don't belong to be updated so they will still get evaluated correctly.
Also fix another problem that happened to be exposed by this test case,
which was that make_join_rel() was failing to notice some cases where
a constant-false qual could be used to prove a join relation empty. If it's
a pushed-down constant false, then the relation is empty even if it's an
outer join, because the qual applies after the outer join expansion.
Per report from Nathan Grange. Back-patch into 9.0.
by adding a requirement that build_join_rel add new join RelOptInfos to the
appropriate list immediately at creation. Per report from Robert Haas,
the list_concat_unique_ptr() calls that this change eliminates were taking
the lion's share of the runtime in larger join problems. This doesn't do
anything to fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join
problems, but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.
Note: because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built,
it might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
alternatives have exactly the same costs. There is one example in the
regression tests.
for the case that the semijoin was implemented within either input by
unique-ifying its RHS before we test to see if it appears to match the current
join situation. The previous coding would select semijoin logic in situations
where we'd already unique-ified the RHS and joined it to some unrelated
relation(s), and then came to join it to the semijoin's LHS. That still gave
the right answer as far as the semijoin itself was concerned, but would lead
to incorrectly examining only an arbitrary one of the matchable rows from the
unrelated relation(s). The cause of this thinko was incorrect unification of
the pre-8.4 logic for IN joins and OUTER joins --- the comparable case for
outer joins can be handled after making the match test, but that's because
there is nothing like the unique-ification escape hatch for outer joins.
Per bug #4934 from Benjamin Reed.
by unique-ifying the RHS and then inner-joining to some other relation,
that is not grounds for violating the RHS of some other outer join.
Noticed while regression-testing new GEQO code, which will blindly follow
any path that join_is_legal says is legal, and then complain later if that
leads to a dead end.
I'm not certain that this can result in any visible failure in 8.4: the
mistake may always be masked by the fact that subsequent attempts to join
the rest of the RHS of the other join will fail. But I'm not certain it
can't, either, and it's definitely not operating as intended. So back-patch.
The added regression test depends on the new no-failures-allowed logic
that I'm about to commit in GEQO, so no point back-patching that.
RHS that can't be unique-ified --- join_is_legal has to check that before
deciding to build a join, else we'll have an unimplementable joinrel.
Per report from Greg Stark.
though it is an inner rather than outer join type. This essentially means
that we don't bother to separate "pushed down" qual conditions from actual
join quals at a semijoin plan node; which is okay because the restrictions of
SQL syntax make it impossible to have a pushed-down qual that references the
inner side of a semijoin. This allows noticeably better optimization of
IN/EXISTS cases than we had before, since the equivalence-class machinery can
now use those quals. Also fix a couple of other mistakes that had essentially
disabled the ability to unique-ify the inner relation and then join it to just
a subset of the left-hand relations. An example case using the regression
database is
select * from tenk1 a, tenk1 b
where (a.unique1,b.unique2) in (select unique1,unique2 from tenk1 c);
which is planned reasonably well by 8.3 and earlier but had been forcing a
cartesian join of a/b in CVS HEAD.
eval_const_expressions will generally throw away anything that's ANDed with
constant FALSE, what we're left with given an example like
select * from tenk1 a where (unique1,0) in (select unique2,1 from tenk1 b);
is a cartesian product computation, which is really not acceptable.
This is a regression in CVS HEAD compared to previous releases, which were
able to notice the impossible join condition in this case --- though not in
some related cases that are also improved by this patch, such as
select * from tenk1 a left join tenk1 b on (a.unique1=b.unique2 and 0=1);
Fix by skipping evaluation of the appropriate side of the outer join in
cases where it's demonstrably unnecessary.
the old JOIN_IN code, but antijoins are new functionality.) Teach the planner
to convert appropriate EXISTS and NOT EXISTS subqueries into semi and anti
joins respectively. Also, LEFT JOINs with suitable upper-level IS NULL
filters are recognized as being anti joins. Unify the InClauseInfo and
OuterJoinInfo infrastructure into "SpecialJoinInfo". With that change,
it becomes possible to associate a SpecialJoinInfo with every join attempt,
which permits some cleanup of join selectivity estimation. That needs to be
taken much further than this patch does, but the next step is to change the
API for oprjoin selectivity functions, which seems like material for a
separate patch. So for the moment the output size estimates for semi and
especially anti joins are quite bogus.
knowledge up through any joins it participates in. We were doing that already
in some special cases but not in the general case. Also, defend against zero
row estimates for the input relations in cost_mergejoin --- this fix may have
eliminated the only scenario in which that can happen, but be safe. Per
report from Alex Solovey.
clauseless joins of relations that have unexploited join clauses. Rather
than looking at every other base relation in the query, the correct thing is
to examine the other relations in the "initial_rels" list of the current
make_rel_from_joinlist() invocation, because those are what we actually have
the ability to join against. This might be a subset of the whole query in
cases where join_collapse_limit or from_collapse_limit or full joins have
prevented merging the whole query into a single join problem. This is a bit
untidy because we have to pass those rels down through a new PlannerInfo
field, but it's necessary. Per bug #3865 from Oleg Kharin.
if either of the input relations can legally be joined to any other rels using
join clauses. This avoids uselessly (and expensively) considering a lot of
really stupid join paths when there is a join restriction with a large
footprint, that is, lots of relations inside its LHS or RHS. My patch of
15-Feb-2007 had been causing the code to consider joining *every* combination
of rels inside such a group, which is exponentially bad :-(. With this
behavior, clauseless bushy joins will be done if necessary, but they'll be
put off as long as possible. Per report from Jakub Ouhrabka.
Backpatch to 8.2. We might someday want to backpatch to 8.1 as well, but 8.1
does not have the problem for OUTER JOIN nests, only for IN-clauses, so it's
not clear anyone's very likely to hit it in practice; and the current patch
doesn't apply cleanly to 8.1.
