Tuple conversion support in tupconvert.c is able to convert rowtypes
between two relations, inner and outer, which are logically equivalent
but have a different ordering or even dropped columns (used mainly for
inheritance tree and partitions). This makes use of attribute mappings,
which are simple arrays made of AttrNumber elements with a length
matching the number of attributes of the outer relation. The length of
the attribute mapping has been treated as completely independent of the
mapping itself until now, making it easy to pass down an incorrect
mapping length.
This commit refactors the code related to attribute mappings and moves
it into an independent facility called attmap.c, extracted from
tupconvert.c. This merges the attribute mapping with its length,
avoiding to try to guess what is the length of a mapping to use as this
is computed once, when the map is built.
This will avoid mistakes like what has been fixed in dc816e58, which has
used an incorrect mapping length by matching it with the number of
attributes of an inner relation (a child partition) instead of an outer
relation (a partitioned table).
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-by: Amit Langote
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191121042556.GD153437@paquier.xyz
Previously, if the startup pruning logic proved that all child nodes
of an Append or MergeAppend could be pruned, we still kept one, just
to keep EXPLAIN from failing. The previous commit removed the
ruleutils.c limitation that required this kluge, so drop it. That
results in less-confusing EXPLAIN output, as per a complaint from
Yuzuko Hosoya.
David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/001001d4f44b$2a2cca50$7e865ef0$@lab.ntt.co.jp
This patch causes EXPLAIN to always assign a separate table alias to the
parent RTE of an append relation (inheritance set); before, such RTEs
were ignored if not actually scanned by the plan. Since the child RTEs
now always have that same alias to start with (cf. commit 55a1954da),
the net effect is that the parent RTE usually gets the alias used or
implied by the query text, and the children all get that alias with "_N"
appended. (The exception to "usually" is if there are duplicate aliases
in different subtrees of the original query; then some of those original
RTEs will also have "_N" appended.)
This results in more uniform output for partitioned-table plans than
we had before: the partitioned table itself gets the original alias,
and all child tables have aliases with "_N", rather than the previous
behavior where one of the children would get an alias without "_N".
The reason for giving the parent RTE an alias, even if it isn't scanned
by the plan, is that we now use the parent's alias to qualify Vars that
refer to an appendrel output column and appear above the Append or
MergeAppend that computes the appendrel. But below the append, Vars
refer to some one of the child relations, and are displayed that way.
This seems clearer than the old behavior where a Var that could carry
values from any child relation was displayed as if it referred to only
one of them.
While at it, change ruleutils.c so that the code paths used by EXPLAIN
deal in Plan trees not PlanState trees. This effectively reverts a
decision made in commit 1cc29fe7c, which seemed like a good idea at
the time to make ruleutils.c consistent with explain.c. However,
it's problematic because we'd really like to allow executor startup
pruning to remove all the children of an append node when possible,
leaving no child PlanState to resolve Vars against. (That's not done
here, but will be in the next patch.) This requires different handling
of subplans and initplans than before, but is otherwise a pretty
straightforward change.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/001001d4f44b$2a2cca50$7e865ef0$@lab.ntt.co.jp
Revert part of commit 19df1702f5.
Early shutdown was added by that commit so that we could collect
statistics from workers, but unfortunately, it interacted badly with
rescans. The problem is that we ended up destroying the parallel context
which is required for rescans. This leads to rescans of a Limit node over
a Gather node to produce unpredictable results as it tries to access
destroyed parallel context. By reverting the early shutdown code, we
might lose statistics in some cases of Limit over Gather [Merge], but that
will require further study to fix.
Reported-by: Jerry Sievers
Diagnosed-by: Thomas Munro
Author: Amit Kapila, testcase by Vignesh C
Backpatch-through: 9.6
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/87ims2amh6.fsf@jsievers.enova.com
Call ExecShutdownNode() after ExecutePlan()'s loop, rather than at each
break. We had forgotten to do that in one case. The omission caused
intermittent "temporary file leak" warnings from multi-batch parallel
hash joins with a LIMIT clause.
Back-patch to 11. Though the problem exists in theory in earlier
parallel query releases, nothing really depended on it.
Author: Kyotaro Horiguchi
Reviewed-by: Thomas Munro, Amit Kapila
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191111.212418.2222262873417235945.horikyota.ntt%40gmail.com
Similar to commits 7e735035f2 and dddf4cdc33, this commit makes the order
of header file inclusion consistent for backend modules.
In the passing, removed a couple of duplicate inclusions.
Author: Vignesh C
Reviewed-by: Kuntal Ghosh and Amit Kapila
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CALDaNm2Sznv8RR6Ex-iJO6xAdsxgWhCoETkaYX=+9DW3q0QCfA@mail.gmail.com
Avoid creating transiently-inconsistent slot states where possible,
by not setting TTS_FLAG_SHOULDFREE until after the slot actually has
a free'able tuple pointer, and by making sure that we reset tts_nvalid
and related derived state before we replace the tuple contents. This
would only matter if something were to examine the slot after we'd
suffered some kind of error (e.g. out of memory) while manipulating
the slot. We typically don't do that, so these changes might just be
cosmetic --- but even if so, it seems like good future-proofing.
Also remove some redundant Asserts, and add a couple for consistency.
Back-patch to v12 where all this code was rewritten.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16095-c3ff2e5283b8dba5@postgresql.org
When maintaining or merging patches, one of the most common sources
for conflicts are the list of objects in makefiles. Especially when
the split across lines has been changed on both sides, which is
somewhat common due to attempting to stay below 80 columns, those
conflicts are unnecessarily laborious to resolve.
By splitting, and alphabetically sorting, OBJS style lines into one
object per line, conflicts should be less frequent, and easier to
resolve when they still occur.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191029200901.vww4idgcxv74cwes@alap3.anarazel.de
The old names for the attribute-detoasting functions names included
the word "heap," which seems outdated now that the heap is only one of
potentially many table access methods.
On the other hand, toast_insert_or_update and toast_delete are
heap-specific, so rename them by adding "heap_" as a prefix.
Not all of the work of making the TOAST system fully accessible to AMs
other than the heap is done yet, but there seems to be little harm in
getting this renaming out of the way now. Commit
8b94dab06617ef80a0901ab103ebd8754427ef5a already divided up the
functions among various files partially according to whether it was
intended that they should be heap-specific or AM-agnostic, so this is
just clarifying the division contemplated by that commit.
Patch by me, reviewed and tested by Prabhat Sabu, Thomas Munro,
Andres Freund, and Álvaro Herrera.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com
That avoids unnecessary work during both interpreted execution, and
JIT compiled expression evaluation. Both benefit from fewer expression
steps needing be processed, and for interpreted execution there now is
a fastpath dedicated to just fetching a value from a virtual
slot. That's e.g. beneficial for hashjoins over nodes that perform
projections, as the hashed columns are currently fetched individually.
Author: Soumyadeep Chakraborty, Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAE-ML+9OKSN71+mHtfMD-L24oDp8dGTfaVjDU6U+j+FNAW5kRQ@mail.gmail.com
In the course of 5567d12ce03, 356687bd8 and 317ffdfeaac, I changed
BuildTupleHashTable[Ext]'s call to ExecBuildGroupingEqual to not pass
in the parent node, but NULL. Which in turn prevents the tuple
equality comparator from being JIT compiled. While that fixes
bug #15486, it is not actually necessary after all of the above commits,
as we don't re-build the comparator when using the new
BuildTupleHashTableExt() interface (as the content of the hashtable
are reset, but the TupleHashTable itself is not).
Therefore re-allow jit compilation for callers that use
BuildTupleHashTableExt with a separate context for "metadata" and
content.
As in the previous commit, there's ongoing work to make this easier to
test to prevent such regressions in the future, but that
infrastructure is not going to be backpatchable.
The performance impact of not JIT compiling hashtable equality
comparators can be substantial e.g. for aggregation queries that
aggregate a lot of input rows to few output rows (when there are a lot
of output groups, there will be fewer comparisons).
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190927072053.njf6prdl3vb7y7qb@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 11, just as 5567d12ce03
For many queries the fact that the tuple descriptor from the lower
node was not taken into account when determining whether the type of a
slot is fixed, lead to tuple deforming for such upper nodes not to be
JIT accelerated.
I broke this in 675af5c01e297.
There is ongoing work to enable writing regression tests for related
behavior (including a patch that would have detected this
regression), by optionally showing such details in EXPLAIN. But as it
seems unlikely that that will be suitable for stable branches, just
merge the fix for now.
While it's fairly close to the 12 release window, the fact that 11
continues to perform JITed tuple deforming in these cases, that
there's still cases where we do so in 12, and the fact that the
performance regression can be sizable, weigh in favor of fixing it
now.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190927072053.njf6prdl3vb7y7qb@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 12-, where 675af5c01e297 was merged.
The code used the destination slot's natts where it intended to
use the source slot's natts. Adding an Assert shows that there
is no case in "make check-world" where these counts are different,
so maybe this is a harmless bug, but it's still a bug.
Takayuki Tsunakawa
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0A3221C70F24FB45833433255569204D1FD34C0E@G01JPEXMBYT05
In ad0bda5d24ea I changed the EvalPlanQual machinery to store
substitution tuples in slot, instead of using plain HeapTuples. The
main motivation for that was that using HeapTuples will be inefficient
for future tableams. But it turns out that that conversion was buggy
for non-locking rowmarks - the wrong tuple descriptor was used to
create the slot.
As a secondary issue 5db6df0c0 changed ExecLockRows() to begin EPQ
earlier, to allow to fetch the locked rows directly into the EPQ
slots, instead of having to copy tuples around. Unfortunately, as Tom
complained, that forces some expensive initialization to happen
earlier.
As a third issue, the test coverage for EPQ was clearly insufficient.
Fixing the first issue is unfortunately not trivial: Non-locked row
marks were fetched at the start of EPQ, and we don't have the type
information for the rowmarks available at that point. While we could
change that, it's not easy. It might be worthwhile to change that at
some point, but to fix this bug, it seems better to delay fetching
non-locking rowmarks when they're actually needed, rather than
eagerly. They're referenced at most once, and in cases where EPQ
fails, might never be referenced. Fetching them when needed also
increases locality a bit.
To be able to fetch rowmarks during execution, rather than
initialization, we need to be able to access the active EPQState, as
that contains necessary data. To do so move EPQ related data from
EState to EPQState, and, only for EStates creates as part of EPQ,
reference the associated EPQState from EState.
To fix the second issue, change EPQ initialization to allow use of
EvalPlanQualSlot() to be used before EvalPlanQualBegin() (but
obviously still requiring EvalPlanQualInit() to have been done).
As these changes made struct EState harder to understand, e.g. by
adding multiple EStates, significantly reorder the members, and add a
lot more comments.
Also add a few more EPQ tests, including one that fails for the first
issue above. More is needed.
Reported-By: yi huang
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/CAHU7rYZo_C4ULsAx_LAj8az9zqgrD8WDd4hTegDTMM1LMqrBsg@mail.gmail.comhttps://postgr.es/m/24530.1562686693@sss.pgh.pa.us
Backpatch: 12-, where the EPQ changes were introduced
detoast.c/h contain functions required to detoast a datum, partially
or completely, plus a few other utility functions for examining the
size of toasted datums.
toast_internals.c/h contain functions that are used internally to the
TOAST subsystem but which (mostly) do not need to be accessed from
outside.
heaptoast.c/h contains code that is intrinsically specific to the
heap AM, either because it operates on HeapTuples or is based on the
layout of a heap page.
detoast.c and toast_internals.c are placed in
src/backend/access/common rather than src/backend/access/heap. At
present, both files still have dependencies on the heap, but that will
be improved in a future commit.
Patch by me, reviewed and tested by Prabhat Sabu, Thomas Munro,
Andres Freund, and Álvaro Herrera.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com
The message was included as a parameter when this function was added in
dcb2bda9b704, but I don't think it has ever served any useful purpose.
Let's stop spreading it pointlessly.
Reviewed by Amit Langote and Peter Eisentraut.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190806224728.GA17233@alvherre.pgsql
For most uses of acl.h the details of how "Acl" internally looks like
are irrelevant. It might make sense to move a lot of the
implementation details into a separate header at a later point.
The main motivation of this change is to avoid including fmgr.h (via
array.h, which needs it for exposed structs) in a lot of files that
otherwise don't need it. A subsequent commit will remove the fmgr.h
include from a lot of files.
Directly include utils/array.h and utils/expandeddatum.h from the
files that need them, but previously included them indirectly, via
acl.h.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190803193733.g3l3x3o42uv4qj7l@alap3.anarazel.de
Now that list_nth is O(1), there's no good reason to maintain a
separate array of RTE pointers rather than indexing into
estate->es_range_table. Deleting the array doesn't save all that
much either; but just on cleanliness grounds, it's better not to
have duplicate representations of the identical information.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14960.1565384592@sss.pgh.pa.us
In the wake of commit 1cff1b95a, the result of list_concat no longer
shares the ListCells of the second input. Therefore, we can replace
"list_concat(x, list_copy(y))" with just "list_concat(x, y)".
To improve call sites that were list_copy'ing the first argument,
or both arguments, invent "list_concat_copy()" which produces a new
list sharing no ListCells with either input. (This is a bit faster
than "list_concat(list_copy(x), y)" because it makes the result list
the right size to start with.)
In call sites that were not list_copy'ing the second argument, the new
semantics mean that we are usually leaking the second List's storage,
since typically there is no remaining pointer to it. We considered
inventing another list_copy variant that would list_free the second
input, but concluded that for most call sites it isn't worth worrying
about, given the relative compactness of the new List representation.
(Note that in cases where such leakage would happen, the old code
already leaked the second List's header; so we're only discussing
the size of the leak not whether there is one. I did adjust two or
three places that had been troubling to free that header so that
they manually free the whole second List.)
Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11587.1550975080@sss.pgh.pa.us
Commit bf6c614a2 rearranged the lookup of the comparison operators
needed in a hashed subplan, and in so doing, broke the cross-type
case: it caused the original LHS-vs-RHS operator to be used to compare
hash table entries too (which of course are all of the RHS type).
This leads to C functions being passed a Datum that is not of the
type they expect, with the usual hazards of crashes and unauthorized
server memory disclosure.
For the set of hashable cross-type operators present in v11 core
Postgres, this bug is nearly harmless on 64-bit machines, which
may explain why it escaped earlier detection. But it is a live
security hazard on 32-bit machines; and of course there may be
extensions that add more hashable cross-type operators, which
would increase the risk.
Reported by Andreas Seltenreich. Back-patch to v11 where the
problem came in.
Security: CVE-2019-10209
In 5f32b29c1819 I changed the creation of HashState.hashkeys to
actually use HashState as the parent (instead of HashJoinState, which
was incorrect, as they were executed below HashState), to fix the
problem of hashkeys expressions otherwise relying on slot types
appropriate for HashJoinState, rather than HashState as would be
correct. That reliance was only introduced in 12, which is why it
previously worked to use HashJoinState as the parent (although I'd be
unsurprised if there were problematic cases).
Unfortunately that's not a sufficient solution, because before this
commit, the to-be-hashed expressions referenced inner/outer as
appropriate for the HashJoin, not Hash. That didn't have obvious bad
consequences, because the slots containing the tuples were put into
ecxt_innertuple when hashing a tuple for HashState (even though Hash
doesn't have an inner plan).
There are less common cases where this can cause visible problems
however (rather than just confusion when inspecting such executor
trees). E.g. "ERROR: bogus varno: 65000", when explaining queries
containing a HashJoin where the subsidiary Hash node's hash keys
reference a subplan. While normally hashkeys aren't displayed by
EXPLAIN, if one of those expressions references a subplan, that
subplan may be printed as part of the Hash node - which then failed
because an inner plan was referenced, and Hash doesn't have that.
It seems quite possible that there's other broken cases, too.
Fix the problem by properly splitting the expression for the HashJoin
and Hash nodes at plan time, and have them reference the proper
subsidiary node. While other workarounds are possible, fixing this
correctly seems easy enough. It was a pretty ugly hack to have
ExecInitHashJoin put the expression into the already initialized
HashState, in the first place.
I decided to not just split inner/outer hashkeys inside
make_hashjoin(), but also to separate out hashoperators and
hashcollations at plan time. Otherwise we would have ended up having
two very similar loops, one at plan time and the other during executor
startup. The work seems to more appropriately belong to plan time,
anyway.
Reported-By: Nikita Glukhov, Alexander Korotkov
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, in an earlier version
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdvGVegF_TKKRiBrSmatJL2dR9uwFCuR+teQ_8tEXU8mxg@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: 12-
These were introduced by pgindent due to fixe to broken
indentation (c.f. 8255c7a5eeba8). Previously the mis-indentation of
function prototypes was creatively used to reduce indentation in a few
places.
As that formatting only exists in master and REL_12_STABLE, it seems
better to fix it in both, rather than having some odd indentation in
v12 that somebody might copy for future patches or such.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190728013754.jwcbe5nfyt3533vx@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 12-
Since 15d8f8312 we assert that - and since 7ef04e4d2cb2, 4da597edf1
rely on - the slot type for an expression's
ecxt_{outer,inner,scan}tuple not changing, unless explicitly flagged
as such. That allows to either skip deforming (for a virtual tuple
slot) or optimize the code for JIT accelerated deforming
appropriately (for other known slot types).
This assumption was sometimes violated for grouping sets, when
nodeAgg.c internally uses tuplesorts, and the child node doesn't
return a TTSOpsMinimalTuple type slot. Detect that case, and flag that
the outer slot might not be "fixed".
It's probably worthwhile to optimize this further in the future, and
more granularly determine whether the slot is fixed. As we already
instantiate per-phase transition and equal expressions, we could
cheaply set the slot type appropriately for each phase. But that's a
separate change from this bugfix.
This commit does include a very minor optimization by avoiding to
create a slot for handling tuplesorts, if no such sorts are
performed. Previously we created that slot unnecessarily in the common
case of computing all grouping sets via hashing. The code looked too
confusing without that, as the conditions for needing a sort slot and
flagging that the slot type isn't fixed, are the same.
Reported-By: Ashutosh Sharma
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAE9k0PmNaMD2oHTEAhRyxnxpaDaYkuBYkLa1dpOpn=RS0iS2AQ@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: 12-, where the bug was introduced in 15d8f8312
After 277cb789836 ON CONFLICT ... SET ... RETURNING failed with
ERROR: virtual tuple table slot does not have system attributes
when taking the update path, as the slot used to insert into the
table (and then process RETURNING) was defined to be a virtual slot in
that commit. Virtual slots don't support system columns except for
tableoid and ctid, as the other system columns are AM dependent.
Fix that by using a slot of the table's type. Add tests for system
column accesses in ON CONFLICT ... RETURNING.
Reported-By: Roby, bisected to the relevant commit by Jeff Janes
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/73436355-6432-49B1-92ED-1FE4F7E7E100@finefun.com.au
Backpatch: 12-, where the bug was introduced in 277cb789836
When we already know the length that we're going to append, then it
makes sense to use appendBinaryStringInfo instead of
appendStringInfoString so that the append can be performed with a simple
memcpy() using a known length rather than having to first perform a
strlen() call to obtain the length.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f8+FRAM1s5+mAa3isajeEoAaicJ=4e0WzrH3tAusbbiMQ@mail.gmail.com
In nodeAppend.c and nodeMergeAppend.c there were some foreach loops which
looped over the list of subplans and only performed any work if the
subplan index was found in a Bitmapset. With the old linked list
implementation of List, this form made sense as accessing the Nth list
element was O(N). However, thanks to 1cff1b95a we now have array-based
lists, so accessing the Nth element has become O(1).
Here we make the most of the O(1) lookups and just loop over the set
members of the Bitmapset with bms_next_member(). This performs slightly
better when a small number of the list items are in the Bitmapset. Micro
benchmarks show that when the Bitmapset contains all or most of the list
items then the new code is ever so slightly slower. In practice, the cost
is so small that it's drowned out by various other things such as locking
the relations belonging to each subplan, etc.
The primary goal here is to leave better code examples around which benefit
better from the new list implementation.
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f8ZcsLVgkF4wOfRyMYTcPgLFiUAOedFC+U2vK_aFZk-BA@mail.gmail.com
Now that commit fec0778c8 drew a clear line between public and private
fields in SPITupleTable, it seems pretty silly that the count of valid
tuples isn't on the public side of that line. The reason why not was
that there wasn't such a count. For reasons lost in the mists of time,
spi.c preferred to keep a count of remaining free entries in the array.
But that seems pretty pointless: it's unlike the way we handle similar
code everywhere else, and it involves extra subtractions that surely
outweigh having to do a comparison rather than test-for-zero to check
for array-full.
Hence, rearrange so that this code does the expansible array logic
the same as everywhere else, with a count of valid entries alongside
the allocated array length. And document the count as public.
I looked for core-code callers where it would make sense to start
relying on tuptable->numvals rather than the separate SPI_processed
variable. Right now there don't seem to be places where it'd be
a win to do so without more code restructuring than I care to
undertake today. In principle, though, having SPITupleTables be
fully self-contained should be helpful down the line.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16852.1563395722@sss.pgh.pa.us
Formerly, lcons was about the same speed as lappend, but with the new
List implementation, that's not so; with a long List, data movement
imposes an O(N) cost on lcons and list_delete_first, but not lappend.
Hence, invent list_delete_last with semantics parallel to
list_delete_first (but O(1) cost), and change various places to use
lappend and list_delete_last where this can be done without much
violence to the code logic.
There are quite a few places that construct result lists using lcons not
lappend. Some have semantic rationales for that; I added comments about
it to a couple that didn't have them already. In many such places though,
I think the coding is that way only because back in the dark ages lcons
was faster than lappend. Hence, switch to lappend where this can be done
without causing semantic changes.
In ExecInitExprRec(), this results in aggregates and window functions that
are in the same plan node being executed in a different order than before.
Generally, the executions of such functions ought to be independent of
each other, so this shouldn't result in visibly different query results.
But if you push it, as one regression test case does, you can show that
the order is different. The new order seems saner; it's closer to
the order of the functions in the query text. And we never documented
or promised anything about this, anyway.
Also, in gistfinishsplit(), don't bother building a reverse-order list;
it's easy now to iterate backwards through the original list.
It'd be possible to go further towards removing uses of lcons and
list_delete_first, but it'd require more extensive logic changes,
and I'm not convinced it's worth it. Most of the remaining uses
deal with queues that probably never get long enough to be worth
sweating over. (Actually, I doubt that any of the changes in this
patch will have measurable performance effects either. But better
to have good examples than bad ones in the code base.)
Patch by me, thanks to David Rowley and Daniel Gustafsson for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/21272.1563318411@sss.pgh.pa.us
This is numbered take 7, and addresses a set of issues around:
- Fixes for typos and incorrect reference names.
- Removal of unneeded comments.
- Removal of unreferenced functions and structures.
- Fixes regarding variable name consistency.
Author: Alexander Lakhin
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/10bfd4ac-3e7c-40ab-2b2e-355ed15495e8@gmail.com
Originally, Postgres Lists were a more or less exact reimplementation of
Lisp lists, which consist of chains of separately-allocated cons cells,
each having a value and a next-cell link. We'd hacked that once before
(commit d0b4399d8) to add a separate List header, but the data was still
in cons cells. That makes some operations -- notably list_nth() -- O(N),
and it's bulky because of the next-cell pointers and per-cell palloc
overhead, and it's very cache-unfriendly if the cons cells end up
scattered around rather than being adjacent.
In this rewrite, we still have List headers, but the data is in a
resizable array of values, with no next-cell links. Now we need at
most two palloc's per List, and often only one, since we can allocate
some values in the same palloc call as the List header. (Of course,
extending an existing List may require repalloc's to enlarge the array.
But this involves just O(log N) allocations not O(N).)
Of course this is not without downsides. The key difficulty is that
addition or deletion of a list entry may now cause other entries to
move, which it did not before.
For example, that breaks foreach() and sister macros, which historically
used a pointer to the current cons-cell as loop state. We can repair
those macros transparently by making their actual loop state be an
integer list index; the exposed "ListCell *" pointer is no longer state
carried across loop iterations, but is just a derived value. (In
practice, modern compilers can optimize things back to having just one
loop state value, at least for simple cases with inline loop bodies.)
In principle, this is a semantics change for cases where the loop body
inserts or deletes list entries ahead of the current loop index; but
I found no such cases in the Postgres code.
The change is not at all transparent for code that doesn't use foreach()
but chases lists "by hand" using lnext(). The largest share of such
code in the backend is in loops that were maintaining "prev" and "next"
variables in addition to the current-cell pointer, in order to delete
list cells efficiently using list_delete_cell(). However, we no longer
need a previous-cell pointer to delete a list cell efficiently. Keeping
a next-cell pointer doesn't work, as explained above, but we can improve
matters by changing such code to use a regular foreach() loop and then
using the new macro foreach_delete_current() to delete the current cell.
(This macro knows how to update the associated foreach loop's state so
that no cells will be missed in the traversal.)
There remains a nontrivial risk of code assuming that a ListCell *
pointer will remain good over an operation that could now move the list
contents. To help catch such errors, list.c can be compiled with a new
define symbol DEBUG_LIST_MEMORY_USAGE that forcibly moves list contents
whenever that could possibly happen. This makes list operations
significantly more expensive so it's not normally turned on (though it
is on by default if USE_VALGRIND is on).
There are two notable API differences from the previous code:
* lnext() now requires the List's header pointer in addition to the
current cell's address.
* list_delete_cell() no longer requires a previous-cell argument.
These changes are somewhat unfortunate, but on the other hand code using
either function needs inspection to see if it is assuming anything
it shouldn't, so it's not all bad.
Programmers should be aware of these significant performance changes:
* list_nth() and related functions are now O(1); so there's no
major access-speed difference between a list and an array.
* Inserting or deleting a list element now takes time proportional to
the distance to the end of the list, due to moving the array elements.
(However, it typically *doesn't* require palloc or pfree, so except in
long lists it's probably still faster than before.) Notably, lcons()
used to be about the same cost as lappend(), but that's no longer true
if the list is long. Code that uses lcons() and list_delete_first()
to maintain a stack might usefully be rewritten to push and pop at the
end of the list rather than the beginning.
* There are now list_insert_nth...() and list_delete_nth...() functions
that add or remove a list cell identified by index. These have the
data-movement penalty explained above, but there's no search penalty.
* list_concat() and variants now copy the second list's data into
storage belonging to the first list, so there is no longer any
sharing of cells between the input lists. The second argument is
now declared "const List *" to reflect that it isn't changed.
This patch just does the minimum needed to get the new implementation
in place and fix bugs exposed by the regression tests. As suggested
by the foregoing, there's a fair amount of followup work remaining to
do.
Also, the ENABLE_LIST_COMPAT macros are finally removed in this
commit. Code using those should have been gone a dozen years ago.
Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley, Jesper Pedersen, and others
for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11587.1550975080@sss.pgh.pa.us
This addresses a couple of issues in the code:
- Typos and inconsistencies in comments and function declarations.
- Removal of unreferenced function declarations.
- Removal of unnecessary compile flags.
- A cleanup error in regressplans.sh.
Author: Alexander Lakhin
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0c991fdf-2670-1997-c027-772a420c4604@gmail.com
There were a number of issues in the recent commits which include typos,
code and comments mismatch, leftover function declarations. Fix them.
Reported-by: Alexander Lakhin
Author: Alexander Lakhin, Amit Kapila and Amit Langote
Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ef0c0232-0c1d-3a35-63d4-0ebd06e31387@gmail.com
When this code was initially introduced in commit d1b7c1ff, the structure
used was SharedPlanStateInstrumentation, but later when it got changed to
Instrumentation structure in commit b287df70, we forgot to update the
comment.
Reported-by: Wu Fei
Author: Wu Fei
Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila
Backpatch-through: 9.6
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/52E6E0843B9D774C8C73D6CF64402F0562215EB2@G08CNEXMBPEKD02.g08.fujitsu.local
