EXPLAIN ANALYZE for an async-capable ForeignScan node associated with
postgres_fdw is done just by using instrumentation for ExecProcNode()
called from the node's callbacks, causing the following problems:
1) If the remote table to scan is empty, the node is incorrectly
considered as "never executed" by the command even if the node is
executed, as ExecProcNode() isn't called from the node's callbacks at
all in that case.
2) The command fails to collect timings for things other than
ExecProcNode() done in the node, such as creating a cursor for the
node's remote query.
To fix these problems, add instrumentation for async-capable nodes, and
modify postgres_fdw accordingly.
My oversight in commit 27e1f1456.
While at it, update a comment for the AsyncRequest struct in execnodes.h
and the documentation for the ForeignAsyncRequest API in fdwhandler.sgml
to match the code in ExecAsyncAppendResponse() in nodeAppend.c, and fix
typos in comments in nodeAppend.c.
Per report from Andrey Lepikhov, though I didn't use his patch.
Reviewed-by: Andrey Lepikhov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2eb662bb-105d-fc20-7412-2f027cc3ca72%40postgrespro.ru
Here we add a new executor node type named "Result Cache". The planner
can include this node type in the plan to have the executor cache the
results from the inner side of parameterized nested loop joins. This
allows caching of tuples for sets of parameters so that in the event that
the node sees the same parameter values again, it can just return the
cached tuples instead of rescanning the inner side of the join all over
again. Internally, result cache uses a hash table in order to quickly
find tuples that have been previously cached.
For certain data sets, this can significantly improve the performance of
joins. The best cases for using this new node type are for join problems
where a large portion of the tuples from the inner side of the join have
no join partner on the outer side of the join. In such cases, hash join
would have to hash values that are never looked up, thus bloating the hash
table and possibly causing it to multi-batch. Merge joins would have to
skip over all of the unmatched rows. If we use a nested loop join with a
result cache, then we only cache tuples that have at least one join
partner on the outer side of the join. The benefits of using a
parameterized nested loop with a result cache increase when there are
fewer distinct values being looked up and the number of lookups of each
value is large. Also, hash probes to lookup the cache can be much faster
than the hash probe in a hash join as it's common that the result cache's
hash table is much smaller than the hash join's due to result cache only
caching useful tuples rather than all tuples from the inner side of the
join. This variation in hash probe performance is more significant when
the hash join's hash table no longer fits into the CPU's L3 cache, but the
result cache's hash table does. The apparent "random" access of hash
buckets with each hash probe can cause a poor L3 cache hit ratio for large
hash tables. Smaller hash tables generally perform better.
The hash table used for the cache limits itself to not exceeding work_mem
* hash_mem_multiplier in size. We maintain a dlist of keys for this cache
and when we're adding new tuples and realize we've exceeded the memory
budget, we evict cache entries starting with the least recently used ones
until we have enough memory to add the new tuples to the cache.
For parameterized nested loop joins, we now consider using one of these
result cache nodes in between the nested loop node and its inner node. We
determine when this might be useful based on cost, which is primarily
driven off of what the expected cache hit ratio will be. Estimating the
cache hit ratio relies on having good distinct estimates on the nested
loop's parameters.
For now, the planner will only consider using a result cache for
parameterized nested loop joins. This works for both normal joins and
also for LATERAL type joins to subqueries. It is possible to use this new
node for other uses in the future. For example, to cache results from
correlated subqueries. However, that's not done here due to some
difficulties obtaining a distinct estimation on the outer plan to
calculate the estimated cache hit ratio. Currently we plan the inner plan
before planning the outer plan so there is no good way to know if a result
cache would be useful or not since we can't estimate the number of times
the subplan will be called until the outer plan is generated.
The functionality being added here is newly introducing a dependency on
the return value of estimate_num_groups() during the join search.
Previously, during the join search, we only ever needed to perform
selectivity estimations. With this commit, we need to use
estimate_num_groups() in order to estimate what the hit ratio on the
result cache will be. In simple terms, if we expect 10 distinct values
and we expect 1000 outer rows, then we'll estimate the hit ratio to be
99%. Since cache hits are very cheap compared to scanning the underlying
nodes on the inner side of the nested loop join, then this will
significantly reduce the planner's cost for the join. However, it's
fairly easy to see here that things will go bad when estimate_num_groups()
incorrectly returns a value that's significantly lower than the actual
number of distinct values. If this happens then that may cause us to make
use of a nested loop join with a result cache instead of some other join
type, such as a merge or hash join. Our distinct estimations have been
known to be a source of trouble in the past, so the extra reliance on them
here could cause the planner to choose slower plans than it did previous
to having this feature. Distinct estimations are also fairly hard to
estimate accurately when several tables have been joined already or when a
WHERE clause filters out a set of values that are correlated to the
expressions we're estimating the number of distinct value for.
For now, the costing we perform during query planning for result caches
does put quite a bit of faith in the distinct estimations being accurate.
When these are accurate then we should generally see faster execution
times for plans containing a result cache. However, in the real world, we
may find that we need to either change the costings to put less trust in
the distinct estimations being accurate or perhaps even disable this
feature by default. There's always an element of risk when we teach the
query planner to do new tricks that it decides to use that new trick at
the wrong time and causes a regression. Users may opt to get the old
behavior by turning the feature off using the enable_resultcache GUC.
Currently, this is enabled by default. It remains to be seen if we'll
maintain that setting for the release.
Additionally, the name "Result Cache" is the best name I could think of
for this new node at the time I started writing the patch. Nobody seems
to strongly dislike the name. A few people did suggest other names but no
other name seemed to dominate in the brief discussion that there was about
names. Let's allow the beta period to see if the current name pleases
enough people. If there's some consensus on a better name, then we can
change it before the release. Please see the 2nd discussion link below
for the discussion on the "Result Cache" name.
Author: David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Andy Fan, Justin Pryzby, Zhihong Yu, Hou Zhijie
Tested-By: Konstantin Knizhnik
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvrPcQyQdWERGYWx8J%2B2DLUNgXu%2BfOSbQ1UscxrunyXyrQ%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvq=yQXr5kqhRviT2RhNKwToaWr9JAN5t+5_PzhuRJ3wvg@mail.gmail.com
This removes "Add Result Cache executor node". It seems that something
weird is going on with the tracking of cache hits and misses as
highlighted by many buildfarm animals. It's not yet clear what the
problem is as other parts of the plan indicate that the cache did work
correctly, it's just the hits and misses that were being reported as 0.
This is especially a bad time to have the buildfarm so broken, so
reverting before too many more animals go red.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvq_hydhfovm4=izgWs+C5HqEeRScjMbOgbpC-jRAeK3Yw@mail.gmail.com
Here we add a new executor node type named "Result Cache". The planner
can include this node type in the plan to have the executor cache the
results from the inner side of parameterized nested loop joins. This
allows caching of tuples for sets of parameters so that in the event that
the node sees the same parameter values again, it can just return the
cached tuples instead of rescanning the inner side of the join all over
again. Internally, result cache uses a hash table in order to quickly
find tuples that have been previously cached.
For certain data sets, this can significantly improve the performance of
joins. The best cases for using this new node type are for join problems
where a large portion of the tuples from the inner side of the join have
no join partner on the outer side of the join. In such cases, hash join
would have to hash values that are never looked up, thus bloating the hash
table and possibly causing it to multi-batch. Merge joins would have to
skip over all of the unmatched rows. If we use a nested loop join with a
result cache, then we only cache tuples that have at least one join
partner on the outer side of the join. The benefits of using a
parameterized nested loop with a result cache increase when there are
fewer distinct values being looked up and the number of lookups of each
value is large. Also, hash probes to lookup the cache can be much faster
than the hash probe in a hash join as it's common that the result cache's
hash table is much smaller than the hash join's due to result cache only
caching useful tuples rather than all tuples from the inner side of the
join. This variation in hash probe performance is more significant when
the hash join's hash table no longer fits into the CPU's L3 cache, but the
result cache's hash table does. The apparent "random" access of hash
buckets with each hash probe can cause a poor L3 cache hit ratio for large
hash tables. Smaller hash tables generally perform better.
The hash table used for the cache limits itself to not exceeding work_mem
* hash_mem_multiplier in size. We maintain a dlist of keys for this cache
and when we're adding new tuples and realize we've exceeded the memory
budget, we evict cache entries starting with the least recently used ones
until we have enough memory to add the new tuples to the cache.
For parameterized nested loop joins, we now consider using one of these
result cache nodes in between the nested loop node and its inner node. We
determine when this might be useful based on cost, which is primarily
driven off of what the expected cache hit ratio will be. Estimating the
cache hit ratio relies on having good distinct estimates on the nested
loop's parameters.
For now, the planner will only consider using a result cache for
parameterized nested loop joins. This works for both normal joins and
also for LATERAL type joins to subqueries. It is possible to use this new
node for other uses in the future. For example, to cache results from
correlated subqueries. However, that's not done here due to some
difficulties obtaining a distinct estimation on the outer plan to
calculate the estimated cache hit ratio. Currently we plan the inner plan
before planning the outer plan so there is no good way to know if a result
cache would be useful or not since we can't estimate the number of times
the subplan will be called until the outer plan is generated.
The functionality being added here is newly introducing a dependency on
the return value of estimate_num_groups() during the join search.
Previously, during the join search, we only ever needed to perform
selectivity estimations. With this commit, we need to use
estimate_num_groups() in order to estimate what the hit ratio on the
result cache will be. In simple terms, if we expect 10 distinct values
and we expect 1000 outer rows, then we'll estimate the hit ratio to be
99%. Since cache hits are very cheap compared to scanning the underlying
nodes on the inner side of the nested loop join, then this will
significantly reduce the planner's cost for the join. However, it's
fairly easy to see here that things will go bad when estimate_num_groups()
incorrectly returns a value that's significantly lower than the actual
number of distinct values. If this happens then that may cause us to make
use of a nested loop join with a result cache instead of some other join
type, such as a merge or hash join. Our distinct estimations have been
known to be a source of trouble in the past, so the extra reliance on them
here could cause the planner to choose slower plans than it did previous
to having this feature. Distinct estimations are also fairly hard to
estimate accurately when several tables have been joined already or when a
WHERE clause filters out a set of values that are correlated to the
expressions we're estimating the number of distinct value for.
For now, the costing we perform during query planning for result caches
does put quite a bit of faith in the distinct estimations being accurate.
When these are accurate then we should generally see faster execution
times for plans containing a result cache. However, in the real world, we
may find that we need to either change the costings to put less trust in
the distinct estimations being accurate or perhaps even disable this
feature by default. There's always an element of risk when we teach the
query planner to do new tricks that it decides to use that new trick at
the wrong time and causes a regression. Users may opt to get the old
behavior by turning the feature off using the enable_resultcache GUC.
Currently, this is enabled by default. It remains to be seen if we'll
maintain that setting for the release.
Additionally, the name "Result Cache" is the best name I could think of
for this new node at the time I started writing the patch. Nobody seems
to strongly dislike the name. A few people did suggest other names but no
other name seemed to dominate in the brief discussion that there was about
names. Let's allow the beta period to see if the current name pleases
enough people. If there's some consensus on a better name, then we can
change it before the release. Please see the 2nd discussion link below
for the discussion on the "Result Cache" name.
Author: David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Andy Fan, Justin Pryzby, Zhihong Yu
Tested-By: Konstantin Knizhnik
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvrPcQyQdWERGYWx8J%2B2DLUNgXu%2BfOSbQ1UscxrunyXyrQ%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvq=yQXr5kqhRviT2RhNKwToaWr9JAN5t+5_PzhuRJ3wvg@mail.gmail.com
This adds a new executor node named TID Range Scan. The query planner
will generate paths for TID Range scans when quals are discovered on base
relations which search for ranges on the table's ctid column. These
ranges may be open at either end. For example, WHERE ctid >= '(10,0)';
will return all tuples on page 10 and over.
To support this, two new optional callback functions have been added to
table AM. scan_set_tidrange is used to set the scan range to just the
given range of TIDs. scan_getnextslot_tidrange fetches the next tuple
in the given range.
For AMs were scanning ranges of TIDs would not make sense, these functions
can be set to NULL in the TableAmRoutine. The query planner won't
generate TID Range Scan Paths in that case.
Author: Edmund Horner, David Rowley
Reviewed-by: David Rowley, Tomas Vondra, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Zhihong Yu
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAMyN-kB-nFTkF=VA_JPwFNo08S0d-Yk0F741S2B7LDmYAi8eyA@mail.gmail.com
Commit 85c9d347 addressed a similar problem for Gather and Gather
Merge nodes but forgot to account for nodes above parallel nodes. This
still works for nodes above Gather node because we shut down the workers
for Gather node as soon as there are no more tuples. We can do a similar
thing for Gather Merge as well but it seems better to account for stats
during nodes shutdown after completing the execution.
Reported-by: Stéphane Lorek, Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais
Author: Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais <jgdr@dalibo.com>
Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila
Backpatch-through: 10, where it was introduced
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200718160206.584532a2@firost
Incremental Sort is an optimized variant of multikey sort for cases when
the input is already sorted by a prefix of the requested sort keys. For
example when the relation is already sorted by (key1, key2) and we need
to sort it by (key1, key2, key3) we can simply split the input rows into
groups having equal values in (key1, key2), and only sort/compare the
remaining column key3.
This has a number of benefits:
- Reduced memory consumption, because only a single group (determined by
values in the sorted prefix) needs to be kept in memory. This may also
eliminate the need to spill to disk.
- Lower startup cost, because Incremental Sort produce results after each
prefix group, which is beneficial for plans where startup cost matters
(like for example queries with LIMIT clause).
We consider both Sort and Incremental Sort, and decide based on costing.
The implemented algorithm operates in two different modes:
- Fetching a minimum number of tuples without check of equality on the
prefix keys, and sorting on all columns when safe.
- Fetching all tuples for a single prefix group and then sorting by
comparing only the remaining (non-prefix) keys.
We always start in the first mode, and employ a heuristic to switch into
the second mode if we believe it's beneficial - the goal is to minimize
the number of unnecessary comparions while keeping memory consumption
below work_mem.
This is a very old patch series. The idea was originally proposed by
Alexander Korotkov back in 2013, and then revived in 2017. In 2018 the
patch was taken over by James Coleman, who wrote and rewrote most of the
current code.
There were many reviewers/contributors since 2013 - I've done my best to
pick the most active ones, and listed them in this commit message.
Author: James Coleman, Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra, Andreas Karlsson, Marti Raudsepp, Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas, Thomas Munro, Antonin Houska, Andres Freund, Alexander Kuzmenkov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdscOX5an71nHd8WSUH6GNOCf=V7wgDaTXdDd9=goN-gfA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
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
The buffer usage stats is accounted only for the execution phase of the
node. For Gather and Gather Merge nodes, such stats are accumulated at
the time of shutdown of workers which is done after execution of node due
to which we missed to account them for such nodes. Fix it by treating
nodes as running while we shut down them.
We can also miss accounting for a Limit node when Gather or Gather Merge
is beneath it, because it can finish the execution before shutting down
such nodes. So we allow a Limit node to shut down the resources before it
completes the execution.
In the passing fix the gather node code to allow workers to shut down as
soon as we find that all the tuples from the workers have been retrieved.
The original code use to do that, but is accidently removed by commit
01edb5c7fc.
Reported-by: Adrien Nayrat
Author: Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
Reviewed-by: Robert Haas and Andres Freund
Backpatch-through: 9.6 where this code was introduced
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/86137f17-1dfb-42f9-7421-82fd786b04a1@anayrat.info
Introduce parallel-aware hash joins that appear in EXPLAIN plans as Parallel
Hash Join with Parallel Hash. While hash joins could already appear in
parallel queries, they were previously always parallel-oblivious and had a
partial subplan only on the outer side, meaning that the work of the inner
subplan was duplicated in every worker.
After this commit, the planner will consider using a partial subplan on the
inner side too, using the Parallel Hash node to divide the work over the
available CPU cores and combine its results in shared memory. If the join
needs to be split into multiple batches in order to respect work_mem, then
workers process different batches as much as possible and then work together
on the remaining batches.
The advantages of a parallel-aware hash join over a parallel-oblivious hash
join used in a parallel query are that it:
* avoids wasting memory on duplicated hash tables
* avoids wasting disk space on duplicated batch files
* divides the work of building the hash table over the CPUs
One disadvantage is that there is some communication between the participating
CPUs which might outweigh the benefits of parallelism in the case of small
hash tables. This is avoided by the planner's existing reluctance to supply
partial plans for small scans, but it may be necessary to estimate
synchronization costs in future if that situation changes. Another is that
outer batch 0 must be written to disk if multiple batches are required.
A potential future advantage of parallel-aware hash joins is that right and
full outer joins could be supported, since there is a single set of matched
bits for each hashtable, but that is not yet implemented.
A new GUC enable_parallel_hash is defined to control the feature, defaulting
to on.
Author: Thomas Munro
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Robert Haas
Tested-By: Rafia Sabih, Prabhat Sahu
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=2W=cOkiZxcg6qiFQP-dHUe09aqTrEMM7yJDrHMhDv_RA@mail.gmail.comhttps://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=37HKyJ4U6XOLi=JgfSHM3o6B-GaeO-6hkOmneTDkH+Uw@mail.gmail.com
In order for executor nodes to be able to change their ExecProcNode function
after ExecInitNode() has finished, provide ExecSetExecProcNode(). This allows
any wrappers functions that only execProcnode.c knows about to be reinstalled.
The motivation for wanting to change ExecProcNode after ExecInitNode() has
finished is that it is not known until later whether parallel query is
available, so if a parallel variant is to be installed then ExecInitNode()
is too soon to decide.
Author: Thomas Munro
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=09rr65VN+cAV5FgyM_z=D77Xy8Fuc9CDDDYbq3pQUezg@mail.gmail.com
If a hash join appears in a parallel query, there may be no hash table
available for explain.c to inspect even though a hash table may have
been built in other processes. This could happen either because
parallel_leader_participation was set to off or because the leader
happened to hit the end of the outer relation immediately (even though
the complete relation is not empty) and decided not to build the hash
table.
Commit bf11e7ee introduced a way for workers to exchange
instrumentation via the DSM segment for Sort nodes even though they
are not parallel-aware. This commit does the same for Hash nodes, so
that explain.c has a way to find instrumentation data from an
arbitrary participant that actually built the hash table.
Author: Thomas Munro
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm%3D3DUQC2-z252N55eOcZBer6DPdM%3DFzrxH9dZc5vYLsjaA%40mail.gmail.com
If we only need, say, 10 tuples in total, then we certainly don't need
more than 10 tuples from any single process. Pushing down the limit
lets workers exit early when possible. For Gather Merge, there is
an additional benefit: a Sort immediately below the Gather Merge can
be done as a bounded sort if there is an applicable limit.
Robert Haas and Tom Lane
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYa3QKKrLj5rX7UvGqhH73G1Li4B-EKxrmASaca2tFu9Q@mail.gmail.com
This allows us to add stack-depth checks the first time an executor
node is called, and skip that overhead on following
calls. Additionally it yields a nice speedup.
While it'd probably have been a good idea to have that check all
along, it has become more important after the new expression
evaluation framework in b8d7f053c5 - there's no stack depth
check in common paths anymore now. We previously relied on
ExecEvalExpr() being executed somewhere.
We should move towards that model for further routines, but as this is
required for v10, it seems better to only do the necessary (which
already is quite large).
Author: Andres Freund, Tom Lane
Reported-By: Julien Rouhaud
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/22833.1490390175@sss.pgh.pa.ushttps://postgr.es/m/b0af9eaa-130c-60d0-9e4e-7a135b1e0c76@dalibo.com
In a followup commit ExecProcNode(), and especially the large switch
it contains, will largely be replaced by a function pointer directly
to the correct node. The node functions will then get invoked by a
thin inline function wrapper. To avoid having to include miscadmin.h
in headers - CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() - move the interrupt checks into
the individual executor routines.
While looking through all executor nodes, I noticed a number of
arguably missing interrupt checks, add these too.
Author: Andres Freund, Tom Lane
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/22833.1490390175@sss.pgh.pa.us
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
A QueryEnvironment concept is added, which allows new types of
objects to be passed into queries from parsing on through
execution. At this point, the only thing implemented is a
collection of EphemeralNamedRelation objects -- relations which
can be referenced by name in queries, but do not exist in the
catalogs. The only type of ENR implemented is NamedTuplestore, but
provision is made to add more types fairly easily.
An ENR can carry its own TupleDesc or reference a relation in the
catalogs by relid.
Although these features can be used without SPI, convenience
functions are added to SPI so that ENRs can easily be used by code
run through SPI.
The initial use of all this is going to be transition tables in
AFTER triggers, but that will be added to each PL as a separate
commit.
An incidental effect of this patch is to produce a more informative
error message if an attempt is made to modify the contents of a CTE
from a referencing DML statement. No tests previously covered that
possibility, so one is added.
Kevin Grittner and Thomas Munro
Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas, David Fetter, and Thomas Munro
with valuable comments and suggestions from many others
Like Gather, we spawn multiple workers and run the same plan in each
one; however, Gather Merge is used when each worker produces the same
output ordering and we want to preserve that output ordering while
merging together the streams of tuples from various workers. (In a
way, Gather Merge is like a hybrid of Gather and MergeAppend.)
This works out to a win if it saves us from having to perform an
expensive Sort. In cases where only a small amount of data would need
to be sorted, it may actually be faster to use a regular Gather node
and then sort the results afterward, because Gather Merge sometimes
needs to wait synchronously for tuples whereas a pure Gather generally
doesn't. But if this avoids an expensive sort then it's a win.
Rushabh Lathia, reviewed and tested by Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro,
and Neha Sharma, and reviewed and revised by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAGPqQf09oPX-cQRpBKS0Gq49Z+m6KBxgxd_p9gX8CKk_d75HoQ@mail.gmail.com
XMLTABLE is defined by the SQL/XML standard as a feature that allows
turning XML-formatted data into relational form, so that it can be used
as a <table primary> in the FROM clause of a query.
This new construct provides significant simplicity and performance
benefit for XML data processing; what in a client-side custom
implementation was reported to take 20 minutes can be executed in 400ms
using XMLTABLE. (The same functionality was said to take 10 seconds
using nested PostgreSQL XPath function calls, and 5 seconds using
XMLReader under PL/Python).
The implemented syntax deviates slightly from what the standard
requires. First, the standard indicates that the PASSING clause is
optional and that multiple XML input documents may be given to it; we
make it mandatory and accept a single document only. Second, we don't
currently support a default namespace to be specified.
This implementation relies on a new executor node based on a hardcoded
method table. (Because the grammar is fixed, there is no extensibility
in the current approach; further constructs can be implemented on top of
this such as JSON_TABLE, but they require changes to core code.)
Author: Pavel Stehule, Álvaro Herrera
Extensively reviewed by: Craig Ringer
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFj8pRAgfzMD-LoSmnMGybD0WsEznLHWap8DO79+-GTRAPR4qA@mail.gmail.com
This is expected to be useful mostly when performing such scans in
parallel, because in that case it allows (in combination with commit
acf555bc53) nodes below a Gather to get
control just before the DSM segment goes away.
KaiGai Kohei, except that I rewrote the documentation. Reviewed by
Claudio Freire.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CADyhKSXJK0jUJ8rWv4AmKDhsUh124_rEn39eqgfC5D8fu6xVuw@mail.gmail.com
Evaluation of set returning functions (SRFs_ in the targetlist (like SELECT
generate_series(1,5)) so far was done in the expression evaluation (i.e.
ExecEvalExpr()) and projection (i.e. ExecProject/ExecTargetList) code.
This meant that most executor nodes performing projection, and most
expression evaluation functions, had to deal with the possibility that an
evaluated expression could return a set of return values.
That's bad because it leads to repeated code in a lot of places. It also,
and that's my (Andres's) motivation, made it a lot harder to implement a
more efficient way of doing expression evaluation.
To fix this, introduce a new executor node (ProjectSet) that can evaluate
targetlists containing one or more SRFs. To avoid the complexity of the old
way of handling nested expressions returning sets (e.g. having to pass up
ExprDoneCond, and dealing with arguments to functions returning sets etc.),
those SRFs can only be at the top level of the node's targetlist. The
planner makes sure (via split_pathtarget_at_srfs()) that SRF evaluation is
only necessary in ProjectSet nodes and that SRFs are only present at the
top level of the node's targetlist. If there are nested SRFs the planner
creates multiple stacked ProjectSet nodes. The ProjectSet nodes always get
input from an underlying node.
We also discussed and prototyped evaluating targetlist SRFs using ROWS
FROM(), but that turned out to be more complicated than we'd hoped.
While moving SRF evaluation to ProjectSet would allow to retain the old
"least common multiple" behavior when multiple SRFs are present in one
targetlist (i.e. continue returning rows until all SRFs are at the end of
their input at the same time), we decided to instead only return rows till
all SRFs are exhausted, returning NULL for already exhausted ones. We
deemed the previous behavior to be too confusing, unexpected and actually
not particularly useful.
As a side effect, the previously prohibited case of multiple set returning
arguments to a function, is now allowed. Not because it's particularly
desirable, but because it ends up working and there seems to be no argument
for adding code to prohibit it.
Currently the behavior for COALESCE and CASE containing SRFs has changed,
returning multiple rows from the expression, even when the SRF containing
"arm" of the expression is not evaluated. That's because the SRFs are
evaluated in a separate ProjectSet node. As that's quite confusing, we're
likely to instead prohibit SRFs in those places. But that's still being
discussed, and the code would reside in places not touched here, so that's
a task for later.
There's a lot of, now superfluous, code dealing with set return expressions
around. But as the changes to get rid of those are verbose largely boring,
it seems better for readability to keep the cleanup as a separate commit.
Author: Tom Lane and Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160822214023.aaxz5l4igypowyri@alap3.anarazel.de
Commit 816e336f12 added the wrong error
check to async.c; sending restrictions is restricted to the leader,
not altogether unsafe.
Commit 3bd909b220 added ExecShutdownNode
to traverse the planstate tree and call shutdown functions, but made
a Gather node, the only node that actually has such a function, abort
the tree traversal, which is wrong.
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
Add a TABLESAMPLE clause to SELECT statements that allows
user to specify random BERNOULLI sampling or block level
SYSTEM sampling. Implementation allows for extensible
sampling functions to be written, using a standard API.
Basic version follows SQLStandard exactly. Usable
concrete use cases for the sampling API follow in later
commits.
Petr Jelinek
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Simon Riggs
This allows extension modules to define their own methods for
scanning a relation, and get the core code to use them. It's
unclear as yet how much use this capability will find, but we
won't find out if we never commit it.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed at various times and in various levels
of detail by Shigeru Hanada, Tom Lane, Andres Freund, Álvaro
Herrera, and myself.
This commit changes index-only scans so that data is read directly from the
index tuple without first generating a faux heap tuple. The only immediate
benefit is that indexes on system columns (such as OID) can be used in
index-only scans, but this is necessary infrastructure if we are ever to
support index-only scans on expression indexes. The executor is now ready
for that, though the planner still needs substantial work to recognize
the possibility.
To do this, Vars in index-only plan nodes have to refer to index columns
not heap columns. I introduced a new special varno, INDEX_VAR, to mark
such Vars to avoid confusion. (In passing, this commit renames the two
existing special varnos to OUTER_VAR and INNER_VAR.) This allows
ruleutils.c to handle them with logic similar to what we use for subplan
reference Vars.
Since index-only scans are now fundamentally different from regular
indexscans so far as their expression subtrees are concerned, I also chose
to change them to have their own plan node type (and hence, their own
executor source file).
This provides information about the numbers of tuples that were visited
but not returned by table scans, as well as the numbers of join tuples
that were considered and discarded within a join plan node.
There is still some discussion going on about the best way to report counts
for outer-join situations, but I think most of what's in the patch would
not change if we revise that, so I'm going to go ahead and commit it as-is.
Documentation changes to follow (they weren't in the submitted patch
either).
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Marc Cousin, somewhat revised by Tom
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed. A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.
Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
Etsuro Fujita