Commit e7cb7ee145 included some design
decisions that seem pretty questionable to me, and there was quite a lot
of stuff not to like about the documentation and comments. Clean up
as follows:
* Consider foreign joins only between foreign tables on the same server,
rather than between any two foreign tables with the same underlying FDW
handler function. In most if not all cases, the FDW would simply have had
to apply the same-server restriction itself (far more expensively, both for
lack of caching and because it would be repeated for each combination of
input sub-joins), or else risk nasty bugs. Anyone who's really intent on
doing something outside this restriction can always use the
set_join_pathlist_hook.
* Rename fdw_ps_tlist/custom_ps_tlist to fdw_scan_tlist/custom_scan_tlist
to better reflect what they're for, and allow these custom scan tlists
to be used even for base relations.
* Change make_foreignscan() API to include passing the fdw_scan_tlist
value, since the FDW is required to set that. Backwards compatibility
doesn't seem like an adequate reason to expect FDWs to set it in some
ad-hoc extra step, and anyway existing FDWs can just pass NIL.
* Change the API of path-generating subroutines of add_paths_to_joinrel,
and in particular that of GetForeignJoinPaths and set_join_pathlist_hook,
so that various less-used parameters are passed in a struct rather than
as separate parameter-list entries. The objective here is to reduce the
probability that future additions to those parameter lists will result in
source-level API breaks for users of these hooks. It's possible that this
is even a small win for the core code, since most CPU architectures can't
pass more than half a dozen parameters efficiently anyway. I kept root,
joinrel, outerrel, innerrel, and jointype as separate parameters to reduce
code churn in joinpath.c --- in particular, putting jointype into the
struct would have been problematic because of the subroutines' habit of
changing their local copies of that variable.
* Avoid ad-hocery in ExecAssignScanProjectionInfo. It was probably all
right for it to know about IndexOnlyScan, but if the list is to grow
we should refactor the knowledge out to the callers.
* Restore nodeForeignscan.c's previous use of the relcache to avoid
extra GetFdwRoutine lookups for base-relation scans.
* Lots of cleanup of documentation and missed comments. Re-order some
code additions into more logical places.
Foreign data wrappers can use this capability for so-called "join
pushdown"; that is, instead of executing two separate foreign scans
and then joining the results locally, they can generate a path which
performs the join on the remote server and then is scanned locally.
This commit does not extend postgres_fdw to take advantage of this
capability; it just provides the infrastructure.
Custom scan providers can use this in a similar way. Previously,
it was only possible for a custom scan provider to scan a single
relation. Now, it can scan an entire join tree, provided of course
that it knows how to produce the same results that the join would
have produced if executed normally.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, Ashutosh Bapat, and me.
Instead of register_custom_path_provider and a CreateCustomScanPath
callback, let's just provide a standard function hook in set_rel_pathlist.
This is more flexible than what was previously committed, is more like the
usual conventions for planner hooks, and requires less support code in the
core. We had discussed this design (including centralizing the
set_cheapest() calls) back in March or so, so I'm not sure why it wasn't
done like this already.
We don't need make_restrictinfo_from_bitmapqual() anymore at all.
generate_bitmap_or_paths() doesn't need to be exported, and we can
drop its rather klugy restriction_only flag.
It's possible to extract a restriction OR clause from a join clause that
has the form of an OR-of-ANDs, if each sub-AND includes a clause that
mentions only one specific relation. While PG has been aware of that idea
for many years, the code previously only did it if it could extract an
indexable OR clause. On reflection, though, that seems a silly limitation:
adding a restriction clause can be a win by reducing the number of rows
that have to be filtered at the join step, even if we have to test the
clause as a plain filter clause during the scan. This should be especially
useful for foreign tables, where the change can cut the number of rows that
have to be retrieved from the foreign server; but testing shows it can win
even on local tables. Per a suggestion from Robert Haas.
As a heuristic, I made the code accept an extracted restriction clause
if its estimated selectivity is less than 0.9, which will probably result
in accepting extracted clauses just about always. We might need to tweak
that later based on experience.
Since the code no longer has even a weak connection to Path creation,
remove orindxpath.c and create a new file optimizer/util/orclauses.c.
There's some additional janitorial cleanup of now-dead code that needs
to happen, but it seems like that's a fit subject for a separate commit.
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
Bug #8591 from Claudio Freire demonstrates that get_eclass_for_sort_expr
must be able to compute valid em_nullable_relids for any new equivalence
class members it creates. I'd worried about this in the commit message
for db9f0e1d9a, but claimed that it wasn't a
problem because multi-member ECs should already exist when it runs. That
is transparently wrong, though, because this function is also called by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses, which runs during deconstruct_jointree.
The example given in the bug report (which the new regression test item
is based upon) fails because the COALESCE() expression is first seen by
initialize_mergeclause_eclasses rather than process_equivalence.
Fixing this requires passing the appropriate nullable_relids set to
get_eclass_for_sort_expr, and it requires new code to compute that set
for top-level expressions such as ORDER BY, GROUP BY, etc. We store
the top-level nullable_relids in a new field in PlannerInfo to avoid
computing it many times. In the back branches, I've added the new
field at the end of the struct to minimize ABI breakage for planner
plugins. There doesn't seem to be a good alternative to changing
get_eclass_for_sort_expr's API signature, though. There probably aren't
any third-party extensions calling that function directly; moreover,
if there are, they probably need to think about what to pass for
nullable_relids anyway.
Back-patch to 9.2, like the previous patch in this area.
This patch gets rid of the concept of, and infrastructure for,
non-canonical PathKeys; we now only ever create canonical pathkey lists.
The need for non-canonical pathkeys came from the desire to have
grouping_planner initialize query_pathkeys and related pathkey lists before
calling query_planner. However, since query_planner didn't actually *do*
anything with those lists before they'd been made canonical, we can get rid
of the whole mess by just not creating the lists at all until the point
where we formerly canonicalized them.
There are several ways in which we could implement that without making
query_planner itself deal with grouping/sorting features (which are
supposed to be the province of grouping_planner). I chose to add a
callback function to query_planner's API; other alternatives would have
required adding more fields to PlannerInfo, which while not bad in itself
would create an ABI break for planner-related plugins in the 9.2 release
series. This still breaks ABI for anything that calls query_planner
directly, but it seems somewhat unlikely that there are any such plugins.
I had originally conceived of this change as merely a step on the way to
fixing bug #8049 from Teun Hoogendoorn; but it turns out that this fixes
that bug all by itself, as per the added regression test. The reason is
that now get_eclass_for_sort_expr is adding the ORDER BY expression at the
end of EquivalenceClass creation not the start, and so anything that is in
a multi-member EquivalenceClass has already been created with correct
em_nullable_relids. I am suspicious that there are related scenarios in
which we still need to teach get_eclass_for_sort_expr to compute correct
nullable_relids, but am not eager to risk destabilizing either 9.2 or 9.3
to fix bugs that are only hypothetical. So for the moment, do this and
stop here.
Back-patch to 9.2 but not to earlier branches, since they don't exhibit
this bug for lack of join-clause-movement logic that depends on
em_nullable_relids being correct. (We might have to revisit that choice
if any related bugs turn up.) In 9.2, don't change the signature of
make_pathkeys_for_sortclauses nor remove canonicalize_pathkeys, so as
not to risk more plugin breakage than we have to.
I wasn't going to ship this without having at least some example of how
to do that. This version isn't terribly bright; in particular it won't
consider any combinations of multiple join clauses. Given the cost of
executing a remote EXPLAIN, I'm not sure we want to be very aggressive
about doing that, anyway.
In support of this, refactor generate_implied_equalities_for_indexcol
so that it can be used to extract equivalence clauses that aren't
necessarily tied to an index.
In a query such as "SELECT DISTINCT min(x) FROM tab", the DISTINCT is
pretty useless (there being only one output row), but nonetheless it
shouldn't fail. But it could fail if "tab" is an inheritance parent,
because planagg.c's code for fixing up equivalence classes after making the
index-optimized MIN/MAX transformation wasn't prepared to find child-table
versions of the aggregate expression. The least ugly fix seems to be
to add an option to mutate_eclass_expressions() to skip child-table
equivalence class members, which aren't used anymore at this stage of
planning so it's not really necessary to fix them. Since child members
are ignored in many cases already, it seems plausible for
mutate_eclass_expressions() to have an option to ignore them too.
Per bug #7703 from Maxim Boguk.
Back-patch to 9.1. Although the same code exists before that, it cannot
encounter child-table aggregates AFAICS, because the index optimization
transformation cannot succeed on inheritance trees before 9.1 (for lack
of MergeAppend).
Given a query such as
SELECT * FROM foo JOIN LATERAL (SELECT foo.var1) ss(x) ON ss.x = foo.var2
the existence of the join clause "ss.x = foo.var2" encourages indxpath.c to
build a parameterized path for foo using any index available for foo.var2.
This is completely useless activity, though, since foo has got to be on the
outside not the inside of any nestloop join with ss. It's reasonably
inexpensive to add tests that prevent creation of such paths, so let's do
that.
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.
In commit 57664ed25e I tried to fix a bug
reported by Teodor Sigaev by making non-simple-Var output columns distinct
(by wrapping their expressions with dummy PlaceHolderVar nodes). This did
not work too well. Commit b28ffd0fcc fixed
some ensuing problems with matching to child indexes, but per a recent
report from Claus Stadler, constraint exclusion of UNION ALL subqueries was
still broken, because constant-simplification didn't handle the injected
PlaceHolderVars well either. On reflection, the original patch was quite
misguided: there is no reason to expect that EquivalenceClass child members
will be distinct. So instead of trying to make them so, we should ensure
that we can cope with the situation when they're not.
Accordingly, this patch reverts the code changes in the above-mentioned
commits (though the regression test cases they added stay). Instead, I've
added assorted defenses to make sure that duplicate EC child members don't
cause any problems. Teodor's original problem ("MergeAppend child's
targetlist doesn't match MergeAppend") is addressed more directly by
revising prepare_sort_from_pathkeys to let the parent MergeAppend's sort
list guide creation of each child's sort list.
In passing, get rid of add_sort_column; as far as I can tell, testing for
duplicate sort keys at this stage is dead code. Certainly it doesn't
trigger often enough to be worth expending cycles on in ordinary queries.
And keeping the test would've greatly complicated the new logic in
prepare_sort_from_pathkeys, because comparing pathkey list entries against
a previous output array requires that we not skip any entries in the list.
Back-patch to 9.1, like the previous patches. The only known issue in
this area that wasn't caused by the ill-advised previous patches was the
MergeAppend planning failure, which of course is not relevant before 9.1.
It's possible that we need some of the new defenses against duplicate child
EC entries in older branches, but until there's some clear evidence of that
I'm going to refrain from back-patching further.
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 e2c2c2e8b1 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.
It's potentially useful for an index to repeat the same indexable column
or expression in multiple index columns, if the columns have different
opclasses. (If they share opclasses too, the duplicate column is pretty
useless, but nonetheless we've allowed such cases since 9.0.) However,
the planner failed to cope with this, because createplan.c was relying on
simple equal() matching to figure out which index column each index qual
is intended for. We do have that information available upstream in
indxpath.c, though, so the fix is to not flatten the multi-level indexquals
list when putting it into an IndexPath. Then we can rely on the sublist
structure to identify target index columns in createplan.c. There's a
similar issue for index ORDER BYs (the KNNGIST feature), so introduce a
multi-level-list representation for that too. This adds a bit more
representational overhead, but we might more or less buy that back by not
having to search for matching index columns anymore in createplan.c;
likewise btcostestimate saves some cycles.
Per bug #6351 from Christian Rudolph. Likely symptoms include the "btree
index keys must be ordered by attribute" failure shown there, as well as
"operator MMMM is not a member of opfamily NNNN".
Although this is a pre-existing problem that can be demonstrated in 9.0 and
9.1, I'm not going to back-patch it, because the API changes in the planner
seem likely to break things such as index plugins. The corner cases where
this matters seem too narrow to justify possibly breaking things in a minor
release.
If the right-hand side of a semijoin is unique, then we can treat it like a
normal join (or another way to say that is: we don't need to explicitly
unique-ify the data before doing it as a normal join). We were recognizing
such cases when the RHS was a sub-query with appropriate DISTINCT or GROUP
BY decoration, but there's another way: if the RHS is a plain relation with
unique indexes, we can check if any of the indexes prove the output is
unique. Most of the infrastructure for that was there already in the join
removal code, though I had to rearrange it a bit. Per reflection about a
recent example in pgsql-performance.
Instead of playing cute games with pathkeys, just build a direct
representation of the intended sub-select, and feed it through
query_planner to get a Path for the index access. This is a bit slower
than 9.1's previous method, since we'll duplicate most of the overhead of
query_planner; but since the whole optimization only applies to rather
simple single-table queries, that probably won't be much of a problem in
practice. The advantage is that we get to do the right thing when there's
a partial index that needs the implicit IS NOT NULL clause to be usable.
Also, although this makes planagg.c be a bit more closely tied to the
ordering of operations in grouping_planner, we can get rid of some coupling
to lower-level parts of the planner. Per complaint from Marti Raudsepp.
All expression nodes now have an explicit output-collation field, unless
they are known to only return a noncollatable data type (such as boolean
or record). Also, nodes that can invoke collation-aware functions store
a separate field that is the collation value to pass to the function.
This avoids confusion that arises when a function has collatable inputs
and noncollatable output type, or vice versa.
Also, replace the parser's on-the-fly collation assignment method with
a post-pass over the completed expression tree. This allows us to use
a more complex (and hopefully more nearly spec-compliant) assignment
rule without paying for it in extra storage in every expression node.
Fix assorted bugs in the planner's handling of collations by making
collation one of the defining properties of an EquivalenceClass and
by converting CollateExprs into discardable RelabelType nodes during
expression preprocessing.
Per my recent proposal, get rid of all the direct inspection of indexes
and manual generation of paths in planagg.c. Instead, set up
EquivalenceClasses for the aggregate argument expressions, and let the
regular path generation logic deal with creating paths that can satisfy
those sort orders. This makes planagg.c a bit more visible to the rest
of the planner than it was originally, but the approach is basically a lot
cleaner than before. A major advantage of doing it this way is that we get
MIN/MAX optimization on inheritance trees (using MergeAppend of indexscans)
practically for free, whereas in the old way we'd have had to add a whole
lot more duplicative logic.
One small disadvantage of this approach is that MIN/MAX aggregates can no
longer exploit partial indexes having an "x IS NOT NULL" predicate, unless
that restriction or something that implies it is specified in the query.
The previous implementation was able to use the added "x IS NOT NULL"
condition as an extra predicate proof condition, but in this version we
rely entirely on indexes that are considered usable by the main planning
process. That seems a fair tradeoff for the simplicity and functionality
gained.
Zoltan Boszormenyi exhibited a test case in which planning time was
dominated by construction of EquivalenceClasses and PathKeys that had no
actual relevance to the query (and in fact got discarded immediately).
This happened because we generated PathKeys describing the sort ordering of
every index on every table in the query, and only after that checked to see
if the sort ordering was relevant. The EC/PK construction code is O(N^2)
in the number of ECs, which is all right for the intended number of such
objects, but it gets out of hand if there are ECs for lots of irrelevant
indexes.
To fix, twiddle the handling of mergeclauses a little bit to ensure that
every interesting EC is created before we begin path generation. (This
doesn't cost anything --- in fact I think it's a bit cheaper than before
--- since we always eventually created those ECs anyway.) Then, if an
index column can't be found in any pre-existing EC, we know that that sort
ordering is irrelevant for the query. Instead of creating a useless EC,
we can just not build a pathkey for the index column in the first place.
The index will still be considered if it's useful for non-order-related
reasons, but we will think of its output as unsorted.
by adding a requirement that build_join_rel add new join RelOptInfos to the
appropriate list immediately at creation. Per report from Robert Haas,
the list_concat_unique_ptr() calls that this change eliminates were taking
the lion's share of the runtime in larger join problems. This doesn't do
anything to fix the fundamental combinatorial explosion in large join
problems, but it should push out the threshold of pain a bit further.
Note: because this changes the order in which joinrel lists are built,
it might result in changes in selected plans in cases where different
alternatives have exactly the same costs. There is one example in the
regression tests.
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
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.
predictable manner; in particular that if you say ORDER BY output-column-ref,
it will in fact sort by that specific column even if there are multiple
syntactic matches. An example is
SELECT random() AS a, random() AS b FROM ... ORDER BY b, a;
While the use-case for this might be a bit debatable, it worked as expected
in earlier releases, so we should preserve the behavior for 8.3. Per my
recent proposal.
While at it, fix convert_subquery_pathkeys() to handle RelabelType stripping
in both directions; it needs this for the same reasons make_sort_from_pathkeys
does.
join search order portion of the planner; this is specifically intended to
simplify developing a replacement for GEQO planning. Patch by Julius
Stroffek, editorialized on by me. I renamed make_one_rel_by_joins to
standard_join_search and make_rels_by_joins to join_search_one_level to better
reflect their place within this scheme.
cheapest-startup-cost innerjoin indexscans, and make joinpath.c consider
both of these (when different) as the inside of a nestloop join. The
original design was based on the assumption that indexscan paths always
have negligible startup cost, and so total cost is the only important
figure of merit; an assumption that's obviously broken by bitmap
indexscans. This oversight could lead to choosing poor plans in cases
where fast-start behavior is more important than total cost, such as
LIMIT and IN queries. 8.1-vintage brain fade exposed by an example from
Chuck D.
possibly be any useful pathkeys --- to wit, queries with neither any
join clauses nor any ORDER BY request. It's nearly free to check for
this case and it saves a useful fraction of the planning time for simple
queries.
considered when it is necessary to do so because of a join-order restriction
(that is, an outer-join or IN-subselect construct). The former coding was a
bit ad-hoc and inconsistent, and it missed some cases, as exposed by Mario
Weilguni's recent bug report. His specific problem was that an IN could be
turned into a "clauseless" join due to constant-propagation removing the IN's
joinclause, and if the IN's subselect involved more than one relation and
there was more than one such IN linking to the same upper relation, then the
only valid join orders involve "bushy" plans but we would fail to consider the
specific paths needed to get there. (See the example case added to the join
regression test.) On examining the code I wonder if there weren't some other
problem cases too; in particular it seems that GEQO was defending against a
different set of corner cases than the main planner was. There was also an
efficiency problem, in that when we did realize we needed a clauseless join
because of an IN, we'd consider clauseless joins against every other relation
whether this was sensible or not. It seems a better design is to use the
outer-join and in-clause lists as a backup heuristic, just as the rule of
joining only where there are joinclauses is a heuristic: we'll join two
relations if they have a usable joinclause *or* this might be necessary to
satisfy an outer-join or IN-clause join order restriction. I refactored the
code to have just one place considering this instead of three, and made sure
that it covered all the cases that any of them had been considering.
Backpatch as far as 8.1 (which has only the IN-clause form of the disease).
By rights 8.0 and 7.4 should have the bug too, but they accidentally fail
to fail, because the joininfo structure used in those releases preserves some
memory of there having once been a joinclause between the inner and outer
sides of an IN, and so it leads the code in the right direction anyway.
I'll be conservative and not touch them.
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.
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.
requested sort order. It was assuming that build_index_pathkeys always
generates a pathkey per index column, which was not true if implied equality
deduction had determined that two index columns were effectively equated to
each other. Simplest fix seems to be to install an option that causes
build_index_pathkeys to support this behavior as well as the original one.
Per report from Brian Hirt.
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.
Tom Lane