Commit 5e0928005 changed the planner so that, instead of blindly using
DEFAULT_COLLATION_OID when invoking operators for selectivity estimation,
it would use the collation of the column whose statistics we're
considering. This was recognized as still being not quite the right
thing, but it seemed like a good incremental improvement. However,
shortly thereafter we introduced nondeterministic collations, and that
creates cases where operators can fail if they're passed the wrong
collation. We don't want planning to fail in cases where the query itself
would work, so this means that we *must* use the query's collation when
invoking operators for estimation purposes.
The only real problem this creates is in ineq_histogram_selectivity, where
the binary search might produce a garbage answer if we perform comparisons
using a different collation than the column's histogram is ordered with.
However, when the query's collation is significantly different from the
column's default collation, the estimate we previously generated would be
pretty irrelevant anyway; so it's not clear that this will result in
noticeably worse estimates in practice. (A follow-on patch will improve
this situation in HEAD, but it seems too invasive for back-patch.)
The patch requires changing the signatures of mcv_selectivity and allied
functions, which are exported and very possibly are used by extensions.
In HEAD, I just did that, but an API/ABI break of this sort isn't
acceptable in stable branches. Therefore, in v12 the patch introduces
"mcv_selectivity_ext" and so on, with signatures matching HEAD, and makes
the old functions into wrappers that assume DEFAULT_COLLATION_OID should
be used. That does not match the prior behavior, but it should avoid risk
of failure in most cases. (In practice, I think most extension datatypes
aren't collation-aware, so the change probably doesn't matter to them.)
Per report from James Lucas. Back-patch to v12 where the problem was
introduced.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAAFmbbOvfi=wMM=3qRsPunBSLb8BFREno2oOzSBS=mzfLPKABw@mail.gmail.com
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