Tom Lane 959d00e9db Use Append rather than MergeAppend for scanning ordered partitions.
If we need ordered output from a scan of a partitioned table, but
the ordering matches the partition ordering, then we don't need to
use a MergeAppend to combine the pre-ordered per-partition scan
results: a plain Append will produce the same results.  This
both saves useless comparison work inside the MergeAppend proper,
and allows us to start returning tuples after istarting up just
the first child node not all of them.

However, all is not peaches and cream, because if some of the
child nodes have high startup costs then there will be big
discontinuities in the tuples-returned-versus-elapsed-time curve.
The planner's cost model cannot handle that (yet, anyway).
If we model the Append's startup cost as being just the first
child's startup cost, we may drastically underestimate the cost
of fetching slightly more tuples than are available from the first
child.  Since we've had bad experiences with over-optimistic choices
of "fast start" plans for ORDER BY LIMIT queries, that seems scary.
As a klugy workaround, set the startup cost estimate for an ordered
Append to be the sum of its children's startup costs (as MergeAppend
would).  This doesn't really describe reality, but it's less likely
to cause a bad plan choice than an underestimated startup cost would.
In practice, the cases where we really care about this optimization
will have child plans that are IndexScans with zero startup cost,
so that the overly conservative estimate is still just zero.

David Rowley, reviewed by Julien Rouhaud and Antonin Houska

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f-hAqhPLRk_RaSFTgYxd=Tz5hA7kQ2h4-DhJufQk8TGuw@mail.gmail.com
2019-04-05 19:20:43 -04:00
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PostgreSQL tests
================

This directory contains a variety of test infrastructure as well as some of the
tests in PostgreSQL. Not all tests are here -- in particular, there are more in
individual contrib/ modules and in src/bin.

Not all these tests get run by "make check". Check src/test/Makefile to see
which tests get run automatically.

authentication/
  Tests for authentication

examples/
  Demonstration programs for libpq that double as regression tests via
  "make check"

isolation/
  Tests for concurrent behavior at the SQL level

locale/
  Sanity checks for locale data, encodings, etc

mb/
  Tests for multibyte encoding (UTF-8) support

modules/
  Extensions used only or mainly for test purposes, generally not suitable
  for installing in production databases

perl/
  Infrastructure for Perl-based TAP tests

recovery/
  Test suite for recovery and replication

regress/
  PostgreSQL's main regression test suite, pg_regress

ssl/
  Tests to exercise and verify SSL certificate handling

subscription/
  Tests for logical replication

thread/
  A thread-safety-testing utility used by configure