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.
on-the-fly, and thereby avoid blowing out memory when the planner has
underestimated the hash table size. Hash join will now obey the
work_mem limit with some faithfulness. Per my recent proposal
(hash aggregate part isn't done yet though).
In the past, we used a 'Lispy' linked list implementation: a "list" was
merely a pointer to the head node of the list. The problem with that
design is that it makes lappend() and length() linear time. This patch
fixes that problem (and others) by maintaining a count of the list
length and a pointer to the tail node along with each head node pointer.
A "list" is now a pointer to a structure containing some meta-data
about the list; the head and tail pointers in that structure refer
to ListCell structures that maintain the actual linked list of nodes.
The function names of the list API have also been changed to, I hope,
be more logically consistent. By default, the old function names are
still available; they will be disabled-by-default once the rest of
the tree has been updated to use the new API names.
directly to the appropriate per-node execution function, using a function
pointer stored by ExecInitExpr. This speeds things up by eliminating one
level of function call. The function-pointer technique also enables further
small improvements such as only making one-time tests once (and then
changing the function pointer). Overall this seems to gain about 10%
on evaluation of simple expressions, which isn't earthshaking but seems
a worthwhile gain for a relatively small hack. Per recent discussion
on pghackers.
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 hashclauses field of the parent HashJoin. This avoids problems with
duplicated links to SubPlans in hash clauses, as per report from
Andrew Holm-Hansen.
specific hash functions used by hash indexes, rather than the old
not-datatype-aware ComputeHashFunc routine. This makes it safe to do
hash joining on several datatypes that previously couldn't use hashing.
The sets of datatypes that are hash indexable and hash joinable are now
exactly the same, whereas before each had some that weren't in the other.
(materialization into a tuple store) discussed on pgsql-hackers earlier.
I've updated the documentation and the regression tests.
Notes on the implementation:
- I needed to change the tuple store API slightly -- it assumes that it
won't be used to hold data across transaction boundaries, so the temp
files that it uses for on-disk storage are automatically reclaimed at
end-of-transaction. I added a flag to tuplestore_begin_heap() to control
this behavior. Is changing the tuple store API in this fashion OK?
- in order to store executor results in a tuple store, I added a new
CommandDest. This works well for the most part, with one exception: the
current DestFunction API doesn't provide enough information to allow the
Executor to store results into an arbitrary tuple store (where the
particular tuple store to use is chosen by the call site of
ExecutorRun). To workaround this, I've temporarily hacked up a solution
that works, but is not ideal: since the receiveTuple DestFunction is
passed the portal name, we can use that to lookup the Portal data
structure for the cursor and then use that to get at the tuple store the
Portal is using. This unnecessarily ties the Portal code with the
tupleReceiver code, but it works...
The proper fix for this is probably to change the DestFunction API --
Tom suggested passing the full QueryDesc to the receiveTuple function.
In that case, callers of ExecutorRun could "subclass" QueryDesc to add
any additional fields that their particular CommandDest needed to get
access to. This approach would work, but I'd like to think about it for
a little bit longer before deciding which route to go. In the mean time,
the code works fine, so I don't think a fix is urgent.
- (semi-related) I added a NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and
adjusted the behavior of SCROLL in accordance with the discussion on
-hackers.
- (unrelated) Cleaned up some SGML markup in sql.sgml, copy.sgml
Neil Conway
computation: reduce the bucket number mod nbatch. This changes the
association between original bucket numbers and batches, but that
doesn't matter. Minor other cleanups in hashjoin code to help
centralize decisions.
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.
execution state trees, and ExecEvalExpr takes an expression state tree
not an expression plan tree. The plan tree is now read-only as far as
the executor is concerned. Next step is to begin actually exploiting
this property.
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.
instead of only one. This should speed up planning (only one hash path
to consider for a given pair of relations) as well as allow more effective
hashing, when there are multiple hashable joinclauses.
value '-2' is used to indicate a variable-width type whose width is
computed as strlen(datum)+1. Everything that looks at typlen is updated
except for array support, which Joe Conway is working on; at the moment
it wouldn't work to try to create an array of cstring.
PostgreSQL. This hash function replaces the one used by hash indexes and
the catalog cache. Hash joins use a different, relatively poor-quality
hash function, but I'll fix that later.
As suggested by Tom Lane, this patch also changes the size of the fixed
hash table used by the catalog cache to be a power-of-2 (instead of a
prime: I chose 256 instead of 257). This allows the catcache to lookup
hash buckets using a simple bitmask. This should improve the performance
of the catalog cache slightly, since the previous method (modulo a
prime) was slow.
In my tests, this improves the performance of hash indexes by between 4%
and 8%; the performance when using btree indexes or seqscans is
basically unchanged.
Neil Conway <neilconway@rogers.com>
maintained for each cache entry. A cache entry will not be freed until
the matching ReleaseSysCache call has been executed. This eliminates
worries about cache entries getting dropped while still in use. See
my posting to pg-hackers of even date for more info.
for example, an SQL function can be used in a functional index. (I make
no promises about speed, but it'll work ;-).) Clean up and simplify
handling of functions returning sets.
right circumstances a hash join executed as a DECLARE CURSOR/FETCH
query would crash the backend. Problem as seen in current sources was
that the hash tables were stored in a context that was a child of
TransactionCommandContext, which got zapped at completion of the FETCH
command --- but cursor cleanup executed at COMMIT expected the tables
to still be valid. I haven't chased down the details as seen in 7.0.*
but I'm sure it's the same general problem.
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
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.
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
That means you can now set your options in either or all of $PGDATA/configuration,
some postmaster option (--enable-fsync=off), or set a SET command. The list of
options is in backend/utils/misc/guc.c, documentation will be written post haste.
pg_options is gone, so is that pq_geqo config file. Also removed were backend -K,
-Q, and -T options (no longer applicable, although -d0 does the same as -Q).
Added to configure an --enable-syslog option.
changed all callers from TPRINTF to elog(DEBUG)
table for an average of NTUP_PER_BUCKET tuples/bucket, but cost_hashjoin
was assuming a target load of one tuple/bucket. This was causing a
noticeable underestimate of hashjoin costs.
from a constraint condition does not violate the constraint (cf. discussion
on pghackers 12/9/99). Implemented by adding a parameter to ExecQual,
specifying whether to return TRUE or FALSE when the qual result is
really NULL in three-valued boolean logic. Currently, ExecRelCheck is
the only caller that asks for TRUE, but if we find any other places that
have the wrong response to NULL, it'll be easy to fix them.
Tom Lane