This allows extension modules to define their own methods for
scanning a relation, and get the core code to use them. It's
unclear as yet how much use this capability will find, but we
won't find out if we never commit it.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed at various times and in various levels
of detail by Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Álvaro
Herrera, and myself.
As of commit a87c72915 (which later got backpatched as far as 9.1),
we're explicitly supporting the notion that append relations can be
nested; this can occur when UNION ALL constructs are nested, or when
a UNION ALL contains a table with inheritance children.
Bug #11457 from Nelson Page, as well as an earlier report from Elvis
Pranskevichus, showed that there were still nasty bugs associated with such
cases: in particular the EquivalenceClass mechanism could try to generate
"join" clauses connecting an appendrel child to some grandparent appendrel,
which would result in assertion failures or bogus plans.
Upon investigation I concluded that all current callers of
find_childrel_appendrelinfo() need to be fixed to explicitly consider
multiple levels of parent appendrels. The most complex fix was in
processing of "broken" EquivalenceClasses, which are ECs for which we have
been unable to generate all the derived equality clauses we would like to
because of missing cross-type equality operators in the underlying btree
operator family. That code path is more or less entirely untested by
the regression tests to date, because no standard opfamilies have such
holes in them. So I wrote a new regression test script to try to exercise
it a bit, which turned out to be quite a worthwhile activity as it exposed
existing bugs in all supported branches.
The present patch is essentially the same as far back as 9.2, which is
where parameterized paths were introduced. In 9.0 and 9.1, we only need
to back-patch a small fragment of commit 5b7b5518d, which fixes failure to
propagate out the original WHERE clauses when a broken EC contains constant
members. (The regression test case results show that these older branches
are noticeably stupider than 9.2+ in terms of the quality of the plans
generated; but we don't really care about plan quality in such cases,
only that the plan not be outright wrong. A more invasive fix in the
older branches would not be a good idea anyway from a plan-stability
standpoint.)
This patch adds the ability to write TABLE( function1(), function2(), ...)
as a single FROM-clause entry. The result is the concatenation of the
first row from each function, followed by the second row from each
function, etc; with NULLs inserted if any function produces fewer rows than
others. This is believed to be a much more useful behavior than what
Postgres currently does with multiple SRFs in a SELECT list.
This syntax also provides a reasonable way to combine use of column
definition lists with WITH ORDINALITY: put the column definition list
inside TABLE(), where it's clear that it doesn't control the ordinality
column as well.
Also implement SQL-compliant multiple-argument UNNEST(), by turning
UNNEST(a,b,c) into TABLE(unnest(a), unnest(b), unnest(c)).
The SQL standard specifies TABLE() with only a single function, not
multiple functions, and it seems to require an implicit UNNEST() which is
not what this patch does. There may be something wrong with that reading
of the spec, though, because if it's right then the spec's TABLE() is just
a pointless alternative spelling of UNNEST(). After further review of
that, we might choose to adopt a different syntax for what this patch does,
but in any case this functionality seems clearly worthwhile.
Andrew Gierth, reviewed by Zoltán Böszörményi and Heikki Linnakangas, and
significantly revised by me
Formerly, query_planner returned one or possibly two Paths for the topmost
join relation, so that grouping_planner didn't see the join RelOptInfo
(at least not directly; it didn't have any hesitation about examining
cheapest_path->parent, though). However, correct selection of the Paths
involved a significant amount of coupling between query_planner and
grouping_planner, a problem which has gotten worse over time. It seems
best to give up on this API choice and instead return the topmost
RelOptInfo explicitly. Then grouping_planner can pull out the Paths it
wants from the rel's path list. In this way we can remove all knowledge
of grouping behaviors from query_planner.
The only real benefit of the old way is that in the case of an empty
FROM clause, we never made any RelOptInfos at all, just a Path. Now
we have to gin up a dummy RelOptInfo to represent the empty FROM clause.
That's not a very big deal though.
While at it, simplify query_planner's API a bit more by having the caller
set up root->tuple_fraction and root->limit_tuples, rather than passing
those values as separate parameters. Since query_planner no longer does
anything with either value, requiring it to fill the PlannerInfo fields
seemed pretty arbitrary.
This patch just rearranges code; it doesn't (intentionally) change any
behaviors. Followup patches will do more interesting things.
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.
Re-allow subquery pullup for LATERAL subqueries, except when the subquery
is below an outer join and contains lateral references to relations outside
that outer join. If we pull up in such a case, we risk introducing lateral
cross-references into outer joins' ON quals, which is something the code is
entirely unprepared to cope with right now; and I'm not sure it'll ever be
worth coping with.
Support lateral refs in VALUES (this seems to be the only additional path
type that needs such support as a consequence of re-allowing subquery
pullup).
Put in a slightly hacky fix for joinpath.c's refusal to consider
parameterized join paths even when there cannot be any unparameterized
ones. This was causing "could not devise a query plan for the given query"
failures in queries involving more than two FROM items.
Put in an even more hacky fix for distribute_qual_to_rels() being unhappy
with join quals that contain references to rels outside their syntactic
scope; which is to say, disable that test altogether. Need to think about
how to preserve some sort of debugging cross-check here, while not
expending more cycles than befits a debugging cross-check.
This patch implements the standard syntax of LATERAL attached to a
sub-SELECT in FROM, and also allows LATERAL attached to a function in FROM,
since set-returning function calls are expected to be one of the principal
use-cases.
The main change here is a rewrite of the mechanism for keeping track of
which relations are visible for column references while the FROM clause is
being scanned. The parser "namespace" lists are no longer lists of bare
RTEs, but are lists of ParseNamespaceItem structs, which carry an RTE
pointer as well as some visibility-controlling flags. Aside from
supporting LATERAL correctly, this lets us get rid of the ancient hacks
that required rechecking subqueries and JOIN/ON and function-in-FROM
expressions for invalid references after they were initially parsed.
Invalid column references are now always correctly detected on sight.
In passing, remove assorted parser error checks that are now dead code by
virtue of our having gotten rid of add_missing_from, as well as some
comments that are obsolete for the same reason. (It was mainly
add_missing_from that caused so much fudging here in the first place.)
The planner support for this feature is very minimal, and will be improved
in future patches. It works well enough for testing purposes, though.
catversion bump forced due to new field in RangeTblEntry.
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.
The original API specification only allowed an FDW to create a single
access path, which doesn't seem like a terribly good idea in hindsight.
Instead, move the responsibility for building the Path node and calling
add_path() into the FDW's PlanForeignScan function. Now, it can do that
more than once if appropriate. There is no longer any need for the
transient FdwPlan struct, so get rid of that.
Etsuro Fujita, Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane
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.
In commit e2c2c2e8b1df7dfdb01e7e6f6191a569ce3c3195 I made use of nested
list structures to show which clauses went with which index columns, but
on reflection that's a data structure that only an old-line Lisp hacker
could love. Worse, it adds unnecessary complication to the many places
that don't much care which clauses go with which index columns. Revert
to the previous arrangement of flat lists of clauses, and instead add a
parallel integer list of column numbers. The places that care about the
pairing can chase both lists with forboth(), while the places that don't
care just examine one list the same as before.
The only real downside to this is that there are now two more lists that
need to be passed to amcostestimate functions in case they care about
column matching (which btcostestimate does, so not passing the info is not
an option). Rather than deal with 11-argument amcostestimate functions,
pass just the IndexPath and expect the functions to extract fields from it.
That gets us down to 7 arguments which is better than 11, and it seems
more future-proof against likely additions to the information we keep
about an index path.
When a btree index contains all columns required by the query, and the
visibility map shows that all tuples on a target heap page are
visible-to-all, we don't need to fetch that heap page. This patch depends
on the previous patches that made the visibility map reliable.
There's a fair amount left to do here, notably trying to figure out a less
chintzy way of estimating the cost of an index-only scan, but the core
functionality seems ready to commit.
Robert Haas and Ibrar Ahmed, with some previous work by Heikki Linnakangas.
Formerly, set_subquery_pathlist and other creators of plans for subqueries
saved only the rangetable and rowMarks lists from the lower-level
PlannerInfo. But there's no reason not to remember the whole PlannerInfo,
and indeed this turns out to simplify matters in a number of places.
The immediate reason for doing this was so that the subroot will still be
accessible when we're trying to extract column statistics out of an
already-planned subquery. But now that I've done it, it seems like a good
code-beautification effort in its own right.
I also chose to get rid of the transient subrtable and subrowmark fields in
SubqueryScan nodes, in favor of having setrefs.c look up the subquery's
RelOptInfo. That required changing all the APIs in setrefs.c to pass
PlannerInfo not PlannerGlobal, which was a large but quite mechanical
transformation.
One side-effect not foreseen at the beginning is that this finally broke
inheritance_planner's assumption that replanning the same subquery RTE N
times would necessarily give interchangeable results each time. That
assumption was always pretty risky, but now we really have to make a
separate RTE for each instance so that there's a place to carry the
separate subroots.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
This is a heavily revised version of builtin_knngist_core-0.9. The
ordering operators are no longer mixed in with actual quals, which would
have confused not only humans but significant parts of the planner.
Instead, ordering operators are carried separately throughout planning and
execution.
Since the API for ambeginscan and amrescan functions had to be changed
anyway, this commit takes the opportunity to rationalize that a bit.
RelationGetIndexScan no longer forces a premature index_rescan call;
instead, callers of index_beginscan must call index_rescan too. Aside from
making the AM-side initialization logic a bit less peculiar, this has the
advantage that we do not make a useless extra am_rescan call when there are
runtime key values. AMs formerly could not assume that the key values
passed to amrescan were actually valid; now they can.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
This patch eliminates the former need to sort the output of an Append scan
when an ordered scan of an inheritance tree is wanted. This should be
particularly useful for fast-start cases such as queries with LIMIT.
Original patch by Greg Stark, with further hacking by Hans-Jurgen Schonig,
Robert Haas, and Tom Lane.
is unique and is not referenced above the join. In this case the inner
side doesn't affect the query result and can be thrown away entirely.
Although perhaps nobody would ever write such a thing by hand, it's
a reasonably common case in machine-generated SQL.
The current implementation only recognizes the case where the inner side
is a simple relation with a unique index matching the query conditions.
This is enough for the use-cases that have been shown so far, but we
might want to try to handle other cases later.
Robert Haas, somewhat rewritten by Tom
There are some unimplemented aspects: recursive queries must use UNION ALL
(should allow UNION too), and we don't have SEARCH or CYCLE clauses.
These might or might not get done for 8.4, but even without them it's a
pretty useful feature.
There are also a couple of small loose ends and definitional quibbles,
which I'll send a memo about to pgsql-hackers shortly. But let's land
the patch now so we can get on with other development.
Yoshiyuki Asaba, with lots of help from Tatsuo Ishii and Tom Lane
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.
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.
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.
(e.g. "INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ...") and elsewhere as allowed
by the spec. (e.g. similar to a FROM clause subselect). initdb required.
Joe Conway and Tom Lane.
effects in a nestloop inner indexscan, I had only dealt with plain index
scans and the index portion of bitmap scans. But there will be cache
benefits for the heap accesses of bitmap scans too, so fix
cost_bitmap_heap_scan() to account for that.
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.
relations: fix the executor so that we can have an Append plan on the
inside of a nestloop and still pass down outer index keys to index scans
within the Append, then generate such plans as if they were regular
inner indexscans. This avoids the need to evaluate the outer relation
multiple times.
thereby sharing code with the inheritance case. This puts the UNION-ALL-view
approach to partitioned tables on par with inheritance, so far as constraint
exclusion is concerned: it works either way. (Still need to update the docs
to say so.) The definition of "simple UNION ALL" is a little simpler than
I would like --- basically the union arms can only be SELECT * FROM foo
--- but it's good enough for partitioned-table cases.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
