representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
which comparison operators to use for plan nodes involving tuple comparison
(Agg, Group, Unique, SetOp). Formerly the executor looked up the default
equality operator for the datatype, which was really pretty shaky, since it's
possible that the data being fed to the node is sorted according to some
nondefault operator class that could have an incompatible idea of equality.
The planner knows what it has sorted by and therefore can provide the right
equality operator to use. Also, this change moves a couple of catalog lookups
out of the executor and into the planner, which should help startup time for
pre-planned queries by some small amount. Modify the planner to remove some
other cavalier assumptions about always being able to use the default
operators. Also add "nulls first/last" info to the Plan node for a mergejoin
--- neither the executor nor the planner can cope yet, but at least the API is
in place.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
cases. Operator classes now exist within "operator families". While most
families are equivalent to a single class, related classes can be grouped
into one family to represent the fact that they are semantically compatible.
Cross-type operators are now naturally adjunct parts of a family, without
having to wedge them into a particular opclass as we had done originally.
This commit restructures the catalogs and cleans up enough of the fallout so
that everything still works at least as well as before, but most of the work
needed to actually improve the planner's behavior will come later. Also,
there are not yet CREATE/DROP/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands; the only way
to create a new family right now is to allow CREATE OPERATOR CLASS to make
one by default. I owe some more documentation work, too. But that can all
be done in smaller pieces once this infrastructure is in place.
tables in the query compete for cache space, not just the one we are
currently costing an indexscan for. This seems more realistic, and it
definitely will help in examples recently exhibited by Stefan
Kaltenbrunner. To get the total size of all the tables involved, we must
tweak the handling of 'append relations' a bit --- formerly we looked up
information about the child tables on-the-fly during set_append_rel_pathlist,
but it needs to be done before we start doing any cost estimation, so
push it into the add_base_rels_to_query scan.
clauses containing no variables and no volatile functions. Such a clause
can be used as a one-time qual in a gating Result plan node, to suppress
plan execution entirely when it is false. Even when the clause is true,
putting it in a gating node wins by avoiding repeated evaluation of the
clause. In previous PG releases, query_planner() would do this for
pseudoconstant clauses appearing at the top level of the jointree, but
there was no ability to generate a gating Result deeper in the plan tree.
To fix it, get rid of the special case in query_planner(), and instead
process pseudoconstant clauses through the normal RestrictInfo qual
distribution mechanism. When a pseudoconstant clause is found attached to
a path node in create_plan(), pull it out and generate a gating Result at
that point. This requires special-casing pseudoconstants in selectivity
estimation and cost_qual_eval, but on the whole it's pretty clean.
It probably even makes the planner a bit faster than before for the normal
case of no pseudoconstants, since removing pull_constant_clauses saves one
useless traversal of the qual tree. Per gripe from Phil Frost.
that the Mackert-Lohmann formula applies across all the repetitions of the
nestloop, not just each scan independently. We use the M-L formula to
estimate the number of pages fetched from the index as well as from the table;
that isn't what it was designed for, but it seems reasonably applicable
anyway. This makes large numbers of repetitions look much cheaper than
before, which accords with many reports we've received of overestimation
of the cost of a nestloop. Also, change the index access cost model to
charge random_page_cost per index leaf page touched, while explicitly
not counting anything for access to metapage or upper tree pages. This
may all need tweaking after we get some field experience, but in simple
tests it seems to be giving saner results than before. The main thing
is to get the infrastructure in place to let cost_index() and amcostestimate
functions take repeated scans into account at all. Per my recent proposal.
Note: this patch changes pg_proc.h, but I did not force initdb because
the changes are basically cosmetic --- the system does not look into
pg_proc to decide how to call an index amcostestimate function, and
there's no way to call such a function from SQL at all.
inheritance trees on-the-fly, which pretty well constrained us to considering
only one way of planning inheritance, expand inheritance sets during the
planner prep phase, and build a side data structure that can be consulted
later to find which RTEs are members of which inheritance sets. As proof of
concept, use the data structure to plan joins against inheritance sets more
efficiently: we can now use indexes on the set members in inner-indexscan
joins. (The generated plans could be improved further, but it'll take some
executor changes.) This data structure will also support handling UNION ALL
subqueries in the same way as inheritance sets, but that aspect of it isn't
finished yet.
Per my recent proposal. I ended up basing the implementation on the
existing mechanism for enforcing valid join orders of IN joins --- the
rules for valid outer-join orders are somewhat similar.
"ctid IN (list)" will still work after we convert IN to ScalarArrayOpExpr.
Make some minor efficiency improvements while at it, such as ensuring that
multiple TIDs are fetched in physical heap order. And fix EXPLAIN so that
it shows what's really going on for a TID scan.
sense and rename to "outerjoin_delayed" to more clearly reflect what it
means). I had decided that it was redundant in 8.1, but the folly of this
is exposed by a bug report from Sebastian Böck. The place where it's
needed is to prevent orindxpath.c from cherry-picking arms of an outer-join
OR clause to form a relation restriction that isn't actually legal to push
down to the relation scan level. There may be some legal cases that this
forbids optimizing, but we'd need much closer analysis to determine it.
so that the latter estimates the number of groups that grouping will
produce. This is needed because it is primarily query_planner that
makes the decision between fast-start and fast-finish plans, and in the
original coding it was unable to make more than a crude rule-of-thumb
choice when the query involved grouping. This revision helps us make
saner choices for queries like SELECT ... GROUP BY ... LIMIT, as in a
recent example from Mark Kirkwood. Also move the responsibility for
canonicalizing sort_pathkeys and group_pathkeys into query_planner;
this information has to be available anyway to support the first change,
and doing it this way lets us get rid of compare_noncanonical_pathkeys
entirely.
propagated inside an outer join. In particular, given
LEFT JOIN ON (A = B) WHERE A = constant, we cannot conclude that
B = constant at the top level (B might be null instead), but we
can nonetheless put a restriction B = constant into the quals for
B's relation, since no inner-side rows not meeting that condition
can contribute to the final result. Similarly, given
FULL JOIN USING (J) WHERE J = constant, we can't directly conclude
that either input J variable = constant, but it's OK to push such
quals into each input rel. Per recent gripe from Kim Bisgaard.
Along the way, remove 'valid_everywhere' flag from RestrictInfo,
as on closer analysis it was not being used for anything, and was
defined backwards anyway.
nonconsecutive columns of a multicolumn index, as per discussion around
mid-May (pghackers thread "Best way to scan on-disk bitmaps"). This
turns out to require only minimal changes in btree, and so far as I can
see none at all in GiST. btcostestimate did need some work, but its
original assumption that index selectivity == heap selectivity was
quite bogus even before this.
to a subquery if the outer query is simple enough that the LIMIT can
be reflected directly to the subquery. This didn't use to be very
interesting, because a subquery that couldn't have been flattened into
the upper query was usually not going to be very responsive to
tuple_fraction anyway. But with new code that allows UNION ALL subqueries
to pay attention to tuple_fraction, this is useful to do. In particular
this lets the optimization occur when the UNION ALL is directly inside
a view.
of a relation in a flat 'joininfo' list. The former arrangement grouped
the join clauses according to the set of unjoined relids used in each;
however, profiling on test cases involving lots of joins proves that
that data structure is a net loss. It takes more time to group the
join clauses together than is saved by avoiding duplicate tests later.
It doesn't help any that there are usually not more than one or two
clauses per group ...
other_rel_list with a single array indexed by rangetable index.
This reduces find_base_rel from O(N) to O(1) without any real penalty.
While find_base_rel isn't one of the major bottlenecks in any profile
I've seen so far, it was starting to creep up on the radar screen
for complex queries --- so might as well fix it.
a new PlannerInfo struct, which is passed around instead of the bare
Query in all the planning code. This commit is essentially just a
code-beautification exercise, but it does open the door to making
larger changes to the planner data structures without having to muck
with the widely-known Query struct.
node, as this behavior is now better done as a bitmap OR indexscan.
This allows considerable simplification in nodeIndexscan.c itself as
well as several planner modules concerned with indexscan plan generation.
Also we can improve the sharing of code between regular and bitmap
indexscans, since they are now working with nigh-identical Plan nodes.
but the code is basically working. Along the way, rewrite the entire
approach to processing OR index conditions, and make it work in join
cases for the first time ever. orindxpath.c is now basically obsolete,
but I left it in for the time being to allow easy comparison testing
against the old implementation.
logic operations during planning. Seems cleaner to create two new Path
node types, instead --- this avoids duplication of cost-estimation code.
Also, create an enable_bitmapscan GUC parameter to control use of bitmap
plans.
scans, using in-memory tuple ID bitmaps as the intermediary. The planner
frontend (path creation and cost estimation) is not there yet, so none
of this code can be executed. I have tested it using some hacked planner
code that is far too ugly to see the light of day, however. Committing
now so that the bulk of the infrastructure changes go in before the tree
drifts under me.
structs. There are many places in the planner where we were passing
both a rel and an index to subroutines, and now need only pass the
index struct. Notationally simpler, and perhaps a tad faster.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
a relation's number of blocks, rather than the possibly-obsolete value
in pg_class.relpages. Scale the value in pg_class.reltuples correspondingly
to arrive at a hopefully more accurate number of rows. When pg_class
contains 0/0, estimate a tuple width from the column datatypes and divide
that into current file size to estimate number of rows. This improved
methodology allows us to jettison the ancient hacks that put bogus default
values into pg_class when a table is first created. Also, per a suggestion
from Simon, make VACUUM (but not VACUUM FULL or ANALYZE) adjust the value
it puts into pg_class.reltuples to try to represent the mean tuple density
instead of the minimal density that actually prevails just after VACUUM.
These changes alter the plans selected for certain regression tests, so
update the expected files accordingly. (I removed join_1.out because
it's not clear if it still applies; we can add back any variant versions
as they are shown to be needed.)
1. Solve the problem of not having TOAST references hiding inside composite
values by establishing the rule that toasting only goes one level deep:
a tuple can contain toasted fields, but a composite-type datum that is
to be inserted into a tuple cannot. Enforcing this in heap_formtuple
is relatively cheap and it avoids a large increase in the cost of running
the tuptoaster during final storage of a row.
2. Fix some interesting problems in expansion of inherited queries that
reference whole-row variables. We never really did this correctly before,
but it's now relatively painless to solve by expanding the parent's
whole-row Var into a RowExpr() selecting the proper columns from the
child.
If you dike out the preventive check in CheckAttributeType(),
composite-type columns now seem to actually work. However, we surely
cannot ship them like this --- without I/O for composite types, you
can't get pg_dump to dump tables containing them. So a little more
work still to do.
with index qual clauses in the Path representation. This saves a little
work during createplan and (probably more importantly) allows reuse of
cached selectivity estimates during indexscan planning. Also fix latent
bug: wrong plan would have been generated for a 'special operator' used
in a nestloop-inner-indexscan join qual, because the special operator
would not have gotten into the list of quals to recheck. This bug is
only latent because at present the special-operator code could never
trigger on a join qual, but sooner or later someone will want to do it.
join conditions in which each OR subclause includes a constraint on
the same relation. This implements the other useful side-effect of
conversion to CNF format, without its unpleasant side-effects. As
per pghackers discussion of a few weeks ago.
teaching the latter to accept either RestrictInfo nodes or bare
clause expressions; and cache the selectivity result in the RestrictInfo
node when possible. This extends the caching behavior of approx_selectivity
to many more contexts, and should reduce duplicate selectivity
calculations.
first time generate an OR indexscan for a two-column index when the WHERE
condition is like 'col1 = foo AND (col2 = bar OR col2 = baz)' --- before,
the OR had to be on the first column of the index or we'd not notice the
possibility of using it. Some progress towards extracting OR indexscans
from subclauses of an OR that references multiple relations, too, although
this code is #ifdef'd out because it needs more work.
fields: now they are valid whenever the clause is a binary opclause,
not only when it is a potential join clause (there is a new boolean
field canjoin to signal the latter condition). This lets us avoid
recomputing the relid sets over and over while examining indexes.
Still more work to do to make this as useful as it could be, because
there are places that could use the info but don't have access to the
RestrictInfo node.
about whether it is applied before or after eval_const_expressions().
I believe there were some corner cases where the system would fail to
recognize that a partial index is applicable because of the previous
inconsistency. Store normal rather than 'implicit AND' representations
of constraints and index predicates in the catalogs.
initdb forced due to representation change of constraints/predicates.