need be returned. We keep a heap of the current best N tuples and sift-up
new tuples into it as we scan the input. For M input tuples this means
only about M*log(N) comparisons instead of M*log(M), not to mention a lot
less workspace when N is small --- avoiding spill-to-disk for large M
is actually the most attractive thing about it. Patch includes planner
and executor support for invoking this facility in ORDER BY ... LIMIT
queries. Greg Stark, with some editorialization by moi.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
per-tuple space overhead for sorts in memory. I chose to replace the
previous patch that tried to write out the bare minimum amount of data
when sorting on disk; instead, just dump the MinimalTuples as-is. This
wastes 3 to 10 bytes per tuple depending on architecture and null-bitmap
length, but the simplification in the writetup/readtup routines seems
worth it.
bits indicating which optional capabilities can actually be exercised
at runtime. This will allow Sort and Material nodes, and perhaps later
other nodes, to avoid unnecessary overhead in common cases.
This commit just adds the infrastructure and arranges to pass the correct
flag values down to plan nodes; none of the actual optimizations are here
yet. I'm committing this separately in case anyone wants to measure the
added overhead. (It should be negligible.)
Simon Riggs and Tom Lane
each tuple, as per my proposal of several days ago. Also, clean up
sort memory management by keeping all working data in a separate memory
context, and refine the handling of low-memory conditions.
generate their output tuple descriptors from their target lists (ie, using
ExecAssignResultTypeFromTL()). We long ago fixed things so that all node
types have minimally valid tlists, so there's no longer any good reason to
have two different ways of doing it. This change is needed to fix bug
reported by Hayden James: the fix of 2005-11-03 to emit the correct column
names after optimizing away a SubqueryScan node didn't work if the new
top-level plan node used ExecAssignResultTypeFromOuterPlan to generate its
tupdesc, since the next plan node down won't have the correct column labels.
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.
Make btree index creation and initial validation of foreign-key constraints
use maintenance_work_mem rather than work_mem as their memory limit.
Add some code to guc.c to allow these variables to be referenced by their
old names in SHOW and SET commands, for backwards compatibility.
the column by table OID and column number, if it's a simple column
reference. Along the way, get rid of reskey/reskeyop fields in Resdoms.
Turns out that representation was not convenient for either the planner
or the executor; we can make the planner deliver exactly what the
executor wants with no more effort.
initdb forced due to change in stored rule representation.
which does the same thing. Perhaps at one time there was a reason to
allow plan nodes to store their result types in different places, but
AFAICT that's been unnecessary for a good while.
a per-query memory context created by CreateExecutorState --- and destroyed
by FreeExecutorState. This provides a final solution to the longstanding
problem of memory leaked by various ExecEndNode calls.
to plan nodes, not vice-versa. All executor state nodes now inherit from
struct PlanState. Copying of plan trees has been simplified by not
storing a list of SubPlans in Plan nodes (eliminating duplicate links).
The executor still needs such a list, but it can build it during
ExecutorStart since it has to scan the plan tree anyway.
No initdb forced since no stored-on-disk structures changed, but you
will need a full recompile because of node-numbering changes.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
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.
memory contexts. Currently, only leaks in expressions executed as
quals or projections are handled. Clean up some old dead cruft in
executor while at it --- unused fields in state nodes, that sort of thing.
a generalized module 'tuplesort.c' that can sort either HeapTuples or
IndexTuples, and is not tied to execution of a Sort node. Clean up
memory leakages in sorting, and replace nbtsort.c's private implementation
of mergesorting with calls to tuplesort.c.
Tom Lane