I broke/typoed this in 4da597edf1. Astonishingly this mostly
doesn't cause breakage, except when trying to change the tuple
descriptor of a slot (because TTS_FLAG_FIXED is assumed to be set).
Author: Andres Freund
For the upcoming pluggable table access methods it's quite
inconvenient to store tuples as HeapTuples, as that'd require
converting tuples from a their native format into HeapTuples. Instead
use slots to manage epq tuples.
To fit into that scheme, change the foreign data wrapper callback
RefetchForeignRow, to store the tuple in a slot. Insist on using the
caller provided slot, so it conveniently can be stored in the
corresponding EPQ slot. As there is no in core user of
RefetchForeignRow, that change was done blindly, but we plan to test
that soon.
To avoid duplicating that work for row locks, move row locks to just
directly use the EPQ slots - it previously temporarily stored tuples
in LockRowsState.lr_curtuples, but that doesn't seem beneficial, given
we'd possibly end up with a significant number of additional slots.
The behaviour of es_epqTupleSet[rti -1] is now checked by
es_epqTupleSlot[rti -1] != NULL, as that is distinguishable from a
slot containing an empty tuple.
Author: Andres Freund, Haribabu Kommi, Ashutosh Bapat
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
After 5408e233f0 it's not necessary to force materializing the
target slot when copying from one buffer slot to another. Previously
that was required because the HeapTupleData portion of the source slot
wasn't guaranteed to stay valid long enough, but now we can simply
copy that part into the destination slot's tupdata.
Author: Andres Freund
In preparation for abstracting table storage, convert trigger.c to
track tuples in slots. Which also happens to make code calling
triggers simpler.
As the calling interface for triggers themselves is not changed in
this patch, HeapTuples still are extracted from the slot at that
time. But that's handled solely inside trigger.c, not visible to
callers. It's quite likely that we'll want to revise the external
trigger interface, but that's a separate large project.
As part of this work the slots used for old/new/return tuples are
moved from EState into ResultRelInfo, as different updated tables
might need different slots. The slots are now also now created
on-demand, which is good both from an efficiency POV, but also makes
the modifying code simpler.
Author: Andres Freund, Amit Khandekar and Ashutosh Bapat
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
After the introduction of tuple table slots all table AMs need to
support returning the table oid of the tuple stored in a slot created
by said AM. It does not make sense to re-implement that in every AM,
therefore move handling of table OIDs into the TupleTableSlot
structure itself. It's possible that we, at a later date, might want
to get rid of HeapTupleData.t_tableOid entirely, but doing so before
the abstractions for table AMs are integrated turns out to be too
hard, so delay that for now.
Similarly, every AM needs to support the concept of a tuple
identifier (tid / item pointer) for its tuples. It's quite possible
that we'll generalize the exact form of a tid at a future point (to
allow for things like index organized tables), but for now many parts
of the code know about tids, so there's not much point in abstracting
tids away. Therefore also move into slot (rather than providing API to
set/get the tid associated with the tuple in a slot).
Once table AM includes insert/updating/deleting tuples, the
responsibility to set the correct tid after such an action will move
into that. After that change, code doing such modifications, should
not have to deal with HeapTuples directly anymore.
Author: Andres Freund, Haribabu Kommi and Ashutosh Bapat
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
This allows to avoid an unnecessary pin/unpin cycle when storing a
tuple in an already pinned buffer into a slot, when the pin isn't
further needed at the call site.
Only a single caller for now (to ensure coverage), but upcoming
patches will increase use of the new function.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
Previously tables declared WITH OIDS, including a significant fraction
of the catalog tables, stored the oid column not as a normal column,
but as part of the tuple header.
This special column was not shown by default, which was somewhat odd,
as it's often (consider e.g. pg_class.oid) one of the more important
parts of a row. Neither pg_dump nor COPY included the contents of the
oid column by default.
The fact that the oid column was not an ordinary column necessitated a
significant amount of special case code to support oid columns. That
already was painful for the existing, but upcoming work aiming to make
table storage pluggable, would have required expanding and duplicating
that "specialness" significantly.
WITH OIDS has been deprecated since 2005 (commit ff02d0a05280e0).
Remove it.
Removing includes:
- CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE syntax for declaring the table to be
WITH OIDS has been removed (WITH (oids[ = true]) will error out)
- pg_dump does not support dumping tables declared WITH OIDS and will
issue a warning when dumping one (and ignore the oid column).
- restoring an pg_dump archive with pg_restore will warn when
restoring a table with oid contents (and ignore the oid column)
- COPY will refuse to load binary dump that includes oids.
- pg_upgrade will error out when encountering tables declared WITH
OIDS, they have to be altered to remove the oid column first.
- Functionality to access the oid of the last inserted row (like
plpgsql's RESULT_OID, spi's SPI_lastoid, ...) has been removed.
The syntax for declaring a table WITHOUT OIDS (or WITH (oids = false)
for CREATE TABLE) is still supported. While that requires a bit of
support code, it seems unnecessary to break applications / dumps that
do not use oids, and are explicit about not using them.
The biggest user of WITH OID columns was postgres' catalog. This
commit changes all 'magic' oid columns to be columns that are normally
declared and stored. To reduce unnecessary query breakage all the
newly added columns are still named 'oid', even if a table's column
naming scheme would indicate 'reloid' or such. This obviously
requires adapting a lot code, mostly replacing oid access via
HeapTupleGetOid() with access to the underlying Form_pg_*->oid column.
The bootstrap process now assigns oids for all oid columns in
genbki.pl that do not have an explicit value (starting at the largest
oid previously used), only oids assigned later by oids will be above
FirstBootstrapObjectId. As the oid column now is a normal column the
special bootstrap syntax for oids has been removed.
Oids are not automatically assigned during insertion anymore, all
backend code explicitly assigns oids with GetNewOidWithIndex(). For
the rare case that insertions into the catalog via SQL are called for
the new pg_nextoid() function can be used (which only works on catalog
tables).
The fact that oid columns on system tables are now normal columns
means that they will be included in the set of columns expanded
by * (i.e. SELECT * FROM pg_class will now include the table's oid,
previously it did not). It'd not technically be hard to hide oid
column by default, but that'd mean confusing behavior would either
have to be carried forward forever, or it'd cause breakage down the
line.
While it's not unlikely that further adjustments are needed, the
scope/invasiveness of the patch makes it worthwhile to get merge this
now. It's painful to maintain externally, too complicated to commit
after the code code freeze, and a dependency of a number of other
patches.
Catversion bump, for obvious reasons.
Author: Andres Freund, with contributions by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180930034810.ywp2c7awz7opzcfr@alap3.anarazel.de
This commit completes the work prepared in 1a0586de36, splitting the
old TupleTableSlot implementation (which could store buffer, heap,
minimal and virtual slots) into four different slot types. As
described in the aforementioned commit, this is done with the goal of
making tuple table slots extensible, to allow for pluggable table
access methods.
To achieve runtime extensibility for TupleTableSlots, operations on
slots that can differ between types of slots are performed using the
TupleTableSlotOps struct provided at slot creation time. That
includes information from the size of TupleTableSlot struct to be
allocated, initialization, deforming etc. See the struct's definition
for more detailed information about callbacks TupleTableSlotOps.
I decided to rename TTSOpsBufferTuple to TTSOpsBufferHeapTuple and
ExecCopySlotTuple to ExecCopySlotHeapTuple, as that seems more
consistent with other naming introduced in recent patches.
There's plenty optimization potential in the slot implementation, but
according to benchmarking the state after this commit has similar
performance characteristics to before this set of changes, which seems
sufficient.
There's a few changes in execReplication.c that currently need to poke
through the slot abstraction, that'll be repaired once the pluggable
storage patchset provides the necessary infrastructure.
Author: Andres Freund and Ashutosh Bapat, with changes by Amit Khandekar
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181105210039.hh4vvi4vwoq5ba2q@alap3.anarazel.de
Upcoming work intends to allow pluggable ways to introduce new ways of
storing table data. Accessing those table access methods from the
executor requires TupleTableSlots to be carry tuples in the native
format of such storage methods; otherwise there'll be a significant
conversion overhead.
Different access methods will require different data to store tuples
efficiently (just like virtual, minimal, heap already require fields
in TupleTableSlot). To allow that without requiring additional pointer
indirections, we want to have different structs (embedding
TupleTableSlot) for different types of slots. Thus different types of
slots are needed, which requires adapting creators of slots.
The slot that most efficiently can represent a type of tuple in an
executor node will often depend on the type of slot a child node
uses. Therefore we need to track the type of slot is returned by
nodes, so parent slots can create slots based on that.
Relatedly, JIT compilation of tuple deforming needs to know which type
of slot a certain expression refers to, so it can create an
appropriate deforming function for the type of tuple in the slot.
But not all nodes will only return one type of slot, e.g. an append
node will potentially return different types of slots for each of its
subplans.
Therefore add function that allows to query the type of a node's
result slot, and whether it'll always be the same type (whether it's
fixed). This can be queried using ExecGetResultSlotOps().
The scan, result, inner, outer type of slots are automatically
inferred from ExecInitScanTupleSlot(), ExecInitResultSlot(),
left/right subtrees respectively. If that's not correct for a node,
that can be overwritten using new fields in PlanState.
This commit does not introduce the actually abstracted implementation
of different kind of TupleTableSlots, that will be left for a followup
commit. The different types of slots introduced will, for now, still
use the same backing implementation.
While this already partially invalidates the big comment in
tuptable.h, it seems to make more sense to update it later, when the
different TupleTableSlot implementations actually exist.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat and Andres Freund, with changes by Amit Khandekar
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181105210039.hh4vvi4vwoq5ba2q@alap3.anarazel.de
Previously materializing a slot always returned a HeapTuple. As
current work aims to reduce the reliance on HeapTuples (so other
storage systems can work efficiently), that needs to change. Thus
split the tasks of materializing a slot (i.e. making it independent
from the underlying storage / other memory contexts) from fetching a
HeapTuple from the slot. For brevity, allow to fetch a HeapTuple from
a slot and materializing the slot at the same time, controlled by a
parameter.
For now some callers of ExecFetchSlotHeapTuple, with materialize =
true, expect that changes to the heap tuple will be reflected in the
underlying slot. Those places will be adapted in due course, so while
not pretty, that's OK for now.
Also rename ExecFetchSlotTuple to ExecFetchSlotHeapTupleDatum and
ExecFetchSlotTupleDatum to ExecFetchSlotHeapTupleDatum, as it's likely
that future storage methods will need similar methods. There already
is ExecFetchSlotMinimalTuple, so the new names make the naming scheme
more coherent.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat and Andres Freund, with changes by Amit Khandekar
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181105210039.hh4vvi4vwoq5ba2q@alap3.anarazel.de
Before this commit slot_getattr() checked for dropped
columns (returning NULL in that case), but only after checking for
previously deformed columns. As slot_deform_tuple() does not contain
such a check, the check in slot_getattr() would often not have been
reached, depending on previous use of the slot.
These days locking and plan invalidation ought to ensure that dropped
columns are not accessed in query plans. Therefore this commit just
drops the insufficient check in slot_getattr(). It's possible that
we'll find some holes againt use of dropped columns, but if so, those
need to be addressed independent of slot_getattr(), as most accesses
don't go through that function anyway.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181107174403.zai7fedgcjoqx44p@alap3.anarazel.de
In a lot of nodes the return slot is not required. That can either be
because the node doesn't do any projection (say an Append node), or
because the node does perform projections but the projection is
optimized away because the projection would yield an identical row.
Slots aren't that small, especially for wide rows, so it's worthwhile
to avoid creating them. It's not possible to just skip creating the
slot - it's currently used to determine the tuple descriptor returned
by ExecGetResultType(). So separate the determination of the result
type from the slot creation. The work previously done internally
ExecInitResultTupleSlotTL() can now also be done separately with
ExecInitResultTypeTL() and ExecInitResultSlot(). That way nodes that
aren't guaranteed to need a result slot, can use
ExecInitResultTypeTL() to determine the result type of the node, and
ExecAssignScanProjectionInfo() (via
ExecConditionalAssignProjectionInfo()) determines that a result slot
is needed, it is created with ExecInitResultSlot().
Besides the advantage of avoiding to create slots that then are
unused, this is necessary preparation for later patches around tuple
table slot abstraction. In particular separating the return descriptor
and slot is a prerequisite to allow JITing of tuple deforming with
knowledge of the underlying tuple format, and to avoid unnecessarily
creating JITed tuple deforming for virtual slots.
This commit removes a redundant argument from
ExecInitResultTupleSlotTL(). While this commit touches a lot of the
relevant lines anyway, it'd normally still not worthwhile to cause
breakage, except that aforementioned later commits will touch *all*
ExecInitResultTupleSlotTL() callers anyway (but fits worse
thematically).
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181105210039.hh4vvi4vwoq5ba2q@alap3.anarazel.de
There's several reasons for this change:
1) It reduces the total size of TupleTableSlot / reduces alignment
padding, making the commonly accessed members fit into a single
cacheline (but we currently do not force proper alignment, so
that's not yet guaranteed to be helpful)
2) Combining the booleans into a flag allows to combine read/writes
from memory.
3) With the upcoming slot abstraction changes, it allows to have core
and extended flags, in a memory efficient way.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat and Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180220224318.gw4oe5jadhpmcdnm@alap3.anarazel.de
heaptuple.c was never a particular good fit for slot_getattr(),
slot_getsomeattrs() and slot_getmissingattrs(), but in upcoming
changes slots will be made more abstract (allowing slots that contain
different types of tuples), making it clearly the wrong place.
Note that slot_deform_tuple() remains in it's current place, as it
clearly deals with a HeapTuple. getmissingattrs() also remains, but
it's less clear that that's correct - but execTuples.c wouldn't be the
right place.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180220224318.gw4oe5jadhpmcdnm@alap3.anarazel.de
TupleDescGetSlot() was kept around for backward compatibility for
user-written SRFs. With the TupleTableSlot abstraction work, that code
will need to be version specific anyway, so there's no point in
keeping the function around any longer.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180220224318.gw4oe5jadhpmcdnm@alap3.anarazel.de
Upcoming changes introduce further types of tuple table slots, in
preparation of making table storage pluggable. New storage methods
will have different representation of tuples, therefore the slot
accessor should refer explicitly to heap tuples.
Instead of just renaming the functions, split it into one function
that accepts heap tuples not residing in buffers, and one accepting
ones in buffers. Previously one function was used for both, but that
was a bit awkward already, and splitting will allow us to represent
slot types for tuples in buffers and normal memory separately.
This is split out from the patch introducing abstract slots, as this
largely consists out of mechanical changes.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180220224318.gw4oe5jadhpmcdnm@alap3.anarazel.de
Currently adding a column to a table with a non-NULL default results in
a rewrite of the table. For large tables this can be both expensive and
disruptive. This patch removes the need for the rewrite as long as the
default value is not volatile. The default expression is evaluated at
the time of the ALTER TABLE and the result stored in a new column
(attmissingval) in pg_attribute, and a new column (atthasmissing) is set
to true. Any existing row when fetched will be supplied with the
attmissingval. New rows will have the supplied value or the default and
so will never need the attmissingval.
Any time the table is rewritten all the atthasmissing and attmissingval
settings for the attributes are cleared, as they are no longer needed.
The most visible code change from this is in heap_attisnull, which
acquires a third TupleDesc argument, allowing it to detect a missing
value if there is one. In many cases where it is known that there will
not be any (e.g. catalog relations) NULL can be passed for this
argument.
Andrew Dunstan, heavily modified from an original patch from Serge
Rielau.
Reviewed by Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Tomas Vondra and David Rowley.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/31e2e921-7002-4c27-59f5-51f08404c858@2ndQuadrant.com
Performing JIT compilation for deforming gains performance benefits
over unJITed deforming from compile-time knowledge of the tuple
descriptor. Fixed column widths, NOT NULLness, etc can be taken
advantage of.
Right now the JITed deforming is only used when deforming tuples as
part of expression evaluation (and obviously only if the descriptor is
known). It's likely to be beneficial in other cases, too.
By default tuple deforming is JITed whenever an expression is JIT
compiled. There's a separate boolean GUC controlling it, but that's
expected to be primarily useful for development and benchmarking.
Docs will follow in a later commit containing docs for the whole JIT
feature.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170901064131.tazjxwus3k2w3ybh@alap3.anarazel.de
The reason for doing so is that it will allow expression evaluation to
optimize based on the underlying tupledesc. In particular it will
allow to JIT tuple deforming together with the expression itself.
For that expression initialization needs to be moved after the
relevant slots are initialized - mostly unproblematic, except in the
case of nodeWorktablescan.c.
After doing so there's no need for ExecAssignResultType() and
ExecAssignResultTypeFromTL() anymore, as all former callers have been
converted to create a slot with a fixed descriptor.
When creating a slot with a fixed descriptor, tts_values/isnull can be
allocated together with the main slot, reducing allocation overhead
and increasing cache density a bit.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171206093717.vqdxe5icqttpxs3p@alap3.anarazel.de
It is equivalent in ANSI C to write (*funcptr) () and funcptr(). These
two styles have been applied inconsistently. After discussion, we'll
use the more verbose style for plain function pointer variables, to make
it clear that it's a variable, and the shorter style when the function
pointer is in a struct (s.func() or s->func()), because then it's clear
that it's not a plain function name, and otherwise the excessive
punctuation makes some of those invocations hard to read.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/f52c16db-14ed-757d-4b48-7ef360b1631d@2ndquadrant.com
This is a mechanical change in preparation for a later commit that
will change the layout of TupleDesc. Introducing a macro to abstract
the details of where attributes are stored will allow us to change
that in separate step and revise it in future.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
This extends the castNode() notation introduced by commit 5bcab1114 to
provide, in one step, extraction of a list cell's pointer and coercion to
a concrete node type. For example, "lfirst_node(Foo, lc)" is the same
as "castNode(Foo, lfirst(lc))". Almost half of the uses of castNode
that have appeared so far include a list extraction call, so this is
pretty widely useful, and it saves a few more keystrokes compared to the
old way.
As with the previous patch, back-patch the addition of these macros to
pg_list.h, so that the notation will be available when back-patching.
Patch by me, after an idea of Andrew Gierth's.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14197.1491841216@sss.pgh.pa.us
If a Gather node has read as many tuples as it needs (for example, due
to Limit) it may detach the queue connecting it to the worker before
reading all of the worker's tuples. Rather than let the worker
continue to generate and send all of the results, have it stop after
sending the next tuple.
More could be done here to stop the worker even quicker, but this is
about as well as we can hope to do for 9.6.
This is in response to a problem report from Andreas Seltenreich.
Commit 44339b892a should be actually be
sufficient to fix that example even without this change, but it seems
better to do this, too, since we might otherwise waste quite a large
amount of effort in one or more workers.
Discussion: CAA4eK1KOKGqmz9bGu+Z42qhRwMbm4R5rfnqsLCNqFs9j14jzEA@mail.gmail.com
Amit Kapila
If a plan node output expression returns an "expanded" datum, and that
output column is referenced in more than one place in upper-level plan
nodes, we need to ensure that what is returned is a read-only reference
not a read/write reference. Otherwise one of the referencing sites could
scribble on or even delete the expanded datum before we have evaluated the
others. Commit 1dc5ebc907, which introduced this feature, supposed
that it'd be sufficient to make SubqueryScan nodes force their output
columns to read-only state. The folly of that was revealed by bug #14174
from Andrew Gierth, and really should have been immediately obvious
considering that the planner will happily optimize SubqueryScan nodes
out of the plan without any regard for this issue.
The safest fix seems to be to make ExecProject() force its results into
read-only state; that will cover every case where a plan node returns
expression results. Actually we can delegate this to ExecTargetList()
since we can recursively assume that plain Vars will not reference
read-write datums. That should keep the extra overhead down to something
minimal. We no longer need ExecMakeSlotContentsReadOnly(), which was
introduced only in support of the idea that just a few plan node types
would need to do this.
In the future it would be nice to have the planner account for this problem
and inject force-to-read-only expression evaluation nodes into only the
places where there's a risk of multiple evaluation. That's not a suitable
solution for 9.5 or even 9.6 at this point, though.
Report: <20160603124628.9932.41279@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
do_text_output_multiline() would fail (typically with a null pointer
dereference crash) if its input string did not end with a newline. Such
cases do not arise in our current sources; but it certainly could happen
in future, or in extension code's usage of the function, so we should fix
it. To fix, replace "eol += len" with "eol = text + len".
While at it, make two cosmetic improvements: mark the input string const,
and rename the argument from "text" to "txt" to dodge pgindent strangeness
(since "text" is a typedef name).
Even though this problem is only latent at present, it seems like a good
idea to back-patch the fix, since it's a very simple/safe patch and it's
not out of the realm of possibility that we might in future back-patch
something that expects sane behavior from do_text_output_multiline().
Per report from Hao Lee.
Report: <CAGoxFiFPAGyPAJLcFxTB5cGhTW2yOVBDYeqDugYwV4dEd1L_Ag@mail.gmail.com>
This patch introduces the ability for complex datatypes to have an
in-memory representation that is different from their on-disk format.
On-disk formats are typically optimized for minimal size, and in any case
they can't contain pointers, so they are often not well-suited for
computation. Now a datatype can invent an "expanded" in-memory format
that is better suited for its operations, and then pass that around among
the C functions that operate on the datatype. There are also provisions
(rudimentary as yet) to allow an expanded object to be modified in-place
under suitable conditions, so that operations like assignment to an element
of an array need not involve copying the entire array.
The initial application for this feature is arrays, but it is not hard
to foresee using it for other container types like JSON, XML and hstore.
I have hopes that it will be useful to PostGIS as well.
In this initial implementation, a few heuristics have been hard-wired
into plpgsql to improve performance for arrays that are stored in
plpgsql variables. We would like to generalize those hacks so that
other datatypes can obtain similar improvements, but figuring out some
appropriate APIs is left as a task for future work. (The heuristics
themselves are probably not optimal yet, either, as they sometimes
force expansion of arrays that would be better left alone.)
Preliminary performance testing shows impressive speed gains for plpgsql
functions that do element-by-element access or update of large arrays.
There are other cases that get a little slower, as a result of added array
format conversions; but we can hope to improve anything that's annoyingly
bad. In any case most applications should see a net win.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Andres Freund
At one time it wasn't terribly important what column names were associated
with the fields of a composite Datum, but since the introduction of
operations like row_to_json(), it's important that looking up the rowtype
ID embedded in the Datum returns the column names that users would expect.
That did not work terribly well before this patch: you could get the column
names of the underlying table, or column aliases from any level of the
query, depending on minor details of the plan tree. You could even get
totally empty field names, which is disastrous for cases like row_to_json().
To fix this for whole-row Vars, look to the RTE referenced by the Var, and
make sure its column aliases are applied to the rowtype associated with
the result Datums. This is a tad scary because we might have to return
a transient RECORD type even though the Var is declared as having some
named rowtype. In principle it should be all right because the record
type will still be physically compatible with the named rowtype; but
I had to weaken one Assert in ExecEvalConvertRowtype, and there might be
third-party code containing similar assumptions.
Similarly, RowExprs have to be willing to override the column names coming
from a named composite result type and produce a RECORD when the column
aliases visible at the site of the RowExpr differ from the underlying
table's column names.
In passing, revert the decision made in commit 398f70ec07 to add
an alias-list argument to ExecTypeFromExprList: better to provide that
functionality in a separate function. This also reverts most of the code
changes in d685814835, which we don't need because we're no longer
depending on the tupdesc found in the child plan node's result slot to be
blessed.
Back-patch to 9.4, but not earlier, since this solution changes the results
in some cases that users might not have realized were buggy. We'll apply a
more restricted form of this patch in older branches.
If we have an array of records stored on disk, the individual record fields
cannot contain out-of-line TOAST pointers: the tuptoaster.c mechanisms are
only prepared to deal with TOAST pointers appearing in top-level fields of
a stored row. The same applies for ranges over composite types, nested
composites, etc. However, the existing code only took care of expanding
sub-field TOAST pointers for the case of nested composites, not for other
structured types containing composites. For example, given a command such
as
UPDATE tab SET arraycol = ARRAY[(ROW(x,42)::mycompositetype] ...
where x is a direct reference to a field of an on-disk tuple, if that field
is long enough to be toasted out-of-line then the TOAST pointer would be
inserted as-is into the array column. If the source record for x is later
deleted, the array field value would become a dangling pointer, leading
to errors along the line of "missing chunk number 0 for toast value ..."
when the value is referenced. A reproducible test case for this was
provided by Jan Pecek, but it seems likely that some of the "missing chunk
number" reports we've heard in the past were caused by similar issues.
Code-wise, the problem is that PG_DETOAST_DATUM() is not adequate to
produce a self-contained Datum value if the Datum is of composite type.
Seen in this light, the problem is not just confined to arrays and ranges,
but could also affect some other places where detoasting is done in that
way, for example form_index_tuple().
I tried teaching the array code to apply toast_flatten_tuple_attribute()
along with PG_DETOAST_DATUM() when the array element type is composite,
but this was messy and imposed extra cache lookup costs whether or not any
TOAST pointers were present, indeed sometimes when the array element type
isn't even composite (since sometimes it takes a typcache lookup to find
that out). The idea of extending that approach to all the places that
currently use PG_DETOAST_DATUM() wasn't attractive at all.
This patch instead solves the problem by decreeing that composite Datum
values must not contain any out-of-line TOAST pointers in the first place;
that is, we expand out-of-line fields at the point of constructing a
composite Datum, not at the point where we're about to insert it into a
larger tuple. This rule is applied only to true composite Datums, not
to tuples that are being passed around the system as tuples, so it's not
as invasive as it might sound at first. With this approach, the amount
of code that has to be touched for a full solution is greatly reduced,
and added cache lookup costs are avoided except when there actually is
a TOAST pointer that needs to be inlined.
The main drawback of this approach is that we might sometimes dereference
a TOAST pointer that will never actually be used by the query, imposing a
rather large cost that wasn't there before. On the other side of the coin,
if the field value is used multiple times then we'll come out ahead by
avoiding repeat detoastings. Experimentation suggests that common SQL
coding patterns are unaffected either way, though. Applications that are
very negatively affected could be advised to modify their code to not fetch
columns they won't be using.
In future, we might consider reverting this solution in favor of detoasting
only at the point where data is about to be stored to disk, using some
method that can drill down into multiple levels of nested structured types.
That will require defining new APIs for structured types, though, so it
doesn't seem feasible as a back-patchable fix.
Note that this patch changes HeapTupleGetDatum() from a macro to a function
call; this means that any third-party code using that macro will not get
protection against creating TOAST-pointer-containing Datums until it's
recompiled. The same applies to any uses of PG_RETURN_HEAPTUPLEHEADER().
It seems likely that this is not a big problem in practice: most of the
tuple-returning functions in core and contrib produce outputs that could
not possibly be toasted anyway, and the same probably holds for third-party
extensions.
This bug has existed since TOAST was invented, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
Thomas Munro