of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
a tuple are being accessed via ExecEvalVar and the attcacheoff shortcut
isn't usable (due to nulls and/or varlena columns). To do this, cache
Datums extracted from a tuple in the associated TupleTableSlot.
Also some code cleanup in and around the TupleTable handling.
Atsushi Ogawa with some kibitzing by Tom Lane.
allocated by plan nodes are not leaked at end of query. This doesn't
really matter for normal queries, but it sure does for queries invoked
repetitively inside SQL functions. Clean up some other grotty code
associated with tupdescs, and fix a few other memory leaks exposed by
tests with simple SQL functions.
joins, and clean things up a good deal at the same time. Append plan node
no longer hacks on rangetable at runtime --- instead, all child tables are
given their own RT entries during planning. Concept of multiple target
tables pushed up into execMain, replacing bug-prone implementation within
nodeAppend. Planner now supports generating Append plans for inheritance
sets either at the top of the plan (the old way) or at the bottom. Expanding
at the bottom is appropriate for tables used as sources, since they may
appear inside an outer join; but we must still expand at the top when the
target of an UPDATE or DELETE is an inheritance set, because we actually need
a different targetlist and junkfilter for each target table in that case.
Fortunately a target table can't be inside an outer join... Bizarre mutual
recursion between union_planner and prepunion.c is gone --- in fact,
union_planner doesn't really have much to do with union queries anymore,
so I renamed it grouping_planner.
Note. all include files that have been hit so far have had extraneous
include files cleaned out and are reduced to...the lowest common
"include file", based on 'cc -Wall -I. test.c', where test.c is:
#include "postgres.h"
#include "<top of branches>" (ie. top of branches this time was utils/fcache2.h)
Tom Lane