This feature has been a thorn in our sides for a long time, causing
many grammatical ambiguity problems. It doesn't seem worth the
pain to continue to support it, so remove it.
There are some follow-on improvements we can make in the grammar,
but this commit only removes the bare minimum number of productions,
plus assorted backend support code.
Note that pg_dump and psql continue to have full support, since
they may be used against older servers. However, pg_dump warns
about postfix operators. There is also a check in pg_upgrade.
Documentation-wise, I (tgl) largely removed the "left unary"
terminology in favor of saying "prefix operator", which is
a more standard and IMO less confusing term.
I included a catversion bump, although no initial catalog data
changes here, to mark the boundary at which oprkind = 'r'
stopped being valid in pg_operator.
Mark Dilger, based on work by myself and Robert Haas;
review by John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/38ca86db-42ab-9b48-2902-337a0d6b8311@2ndquadrant.com
Originally, Postgres Lists were a more or less exact reimplementation of
Lisp lists, which consist of chains of separately-allocated cons cells,
each having a value and a next-cell link. We'd hacked that once before
(commit d0b4399d8) to add a separate List header, but the data was still
in cons cells. That makes some operations -- notably list_nth() -- O(N),
and it's bulky because of the next-cell pointers and per-cell palloc
overhead, and it's very cache-unfriendly if the cons cells end up
scattered around rather than being adjacent.
In this rewrite, we still have List headers, but the data is in a
resizable array of values, with no next-cell links. Now we need at
most two palloc's per List, and often only one, since we can allocate
some values in the same palloc call as the List header. (Of course,
extending an existing List may require repalloc's to enlarge the array.
But this involves just O(log N) allocations not O(N).)
Of course this is not without downsides. The key difficulty is that
addition or deletion of a list entry may now cause other entries to
move, which it did not before.
For example, that breaks foreach() and sister macros, which historically
used a pointer to the current cons-cell as loop state. We can repair
those macros transparently by making their actual loop state be an
integer list index; the exposed "ListCell *" pointer is no longer state
carried across loop iterations, but is just a derived value. (In
practice, modern compilers can optimize things back to having just one
loop state value, at least for simple cases with inline loop bodies.)
In principle, this is a semantics change for cases where the loop body
inserts or deletes list entries ahead of the current loop index; but
I found no such cases in the Postgres code.
The change is not at all transparent for code that doesn't use foreach()
but chases lists "by hand" using lnext(). The largest share of such
code in the backend is in loops that were maintaining "prev" and "next"
variables in addition to the current-cell pointer, in order to delete
list cells efficiently using list_delete_cell(). However, we no longer
need a previous-cell pointer to delete a list cell efficiently. Keeping
a next-cell pointer doesn't work, as explained above, but we can improve
matters by changing such code to use a regular foreach() loop and then
using the new macro foreach_delete_current() to delete the current cell.
(This macro knows how to update the associated foreach loop's state so
that no cells will be missed in the traversal.)
There remains a nontrivial risk of code assuming that a ListCell *
pointer will remain good over an operation that could now move the list
contents. To help catch such errors, list.c can be compiled with a new
define symbol DEBUG_LIST_MEMORY_USAGE that forcibly moves list contents
whenever that could possibly happen. This makes list operations
significantly more expensive so it's not normally turned on (though it
is on by default if USE_VALGRIND is on).
There are two notable API differences from the previous code:
* lnext() now requires the List's header pointer in addition to the
current cell's address.
* list_delete_cell() no longer requires a previous-cell argument.
These changes are somewhat unfortunate, but on the other hand code using
either function needs inspection to see if it is assuming anything
it shouldn't, so it's not all bad.
Programmers should be aware of these significant performance changes:
* list_nth() and related functions are now O(1); so there's no
major access-speed difference between a list and an array.
* Inserting or deleting a list element now takes time proportional to
the distance to the end of the list, due to moving the array elements.
(However, it typically *doesn't* require palloc or pfree, so except in
long lists it's probably still faster than before.) Notably, lcons()
used to be about the same cost as lappend(), but that's no longer true
if the list is long. Code that uses lcons() and list_delete_first()
to maintain a stack might usefully be rewritten to push and pop at the
end of the list rather than the beginning.
* There are now list_insert_nth...() and list_delete_nth...() functions
that add or remove a list cell identified by index. These have the
data-movement penalty explained above, but there's no search penalty.
* list_concat() and variants now copy the second list's data into
storage belonging to the first list, so there is no longer any
sharing of cells between the input lists. The second argument is
now declared "const List *" to reflect that it isn't changed.
This patch just does the minimum needed to get the new implementation
in place and fix bugs exposed by the regression tests. As suggested
by the foregoing, there's a fair amount of followup work remaining to
do.
Also, the ENABLE_LIST_COMPAT macros are finally removed in this
commit. Code using those should have been gone a dozen years ago.
Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley, Jesper Pedersen, and others
for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11587.1550975080@sss.pgh.pa.us
The old name of this file was never a very good indication of what it
was for. Now that there's also access/relation.h, we have a potential
confusion hazard as well, so let's rename it to something more apropos.
Per discussion, "pathnodes.h" is reasonable, since a good fraction of
the file is Path node definitions.
While at it, tweak a couple of other headers that were gratuitously
importing relation.h into modules that don't need it.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/7719.1548688728@sss.pgh.pa.us
Move a few very simple node-creation and node-type-testing functions
from the planner's clauses.c to nodes/makefuncs and nodes/nodeFuncs.
There's nothing planner-specific about them, as evidenced by the
number of other places that were using them.
While at it, rename and_clause() etc to is_andclause() etc, to clarify
that they are node-type-testing functions not node-creation functions.
And use "static inline" implementations for the shortest ones.
Also, modify flatten_join_alias_vars() and some subsidiary functions
to take a Query not a PlannerInfo to define the join structure that
Vars should be translated according to. They were only using the
"parse" field of the PlannerInfo anyway, so this just requires removing
one level of indirection. The advantage is that now parse_agg.c can
use flatten_join_alias_vars() without the horrid kluge of creating an
incomplete PlannerInfo, which will allow that file to be decoupled from
relation.h in a subsequent patch.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11460.1548706639@sss.pgh.pa.us
The fact that "SELECT expression" has no base relations has long been a
thorn in the side of the planner. It makes it hard to flatten a sub-query
that looks like that, or is a trivial VALUES() item, because the planner
generally uses relid sets to identify sub-relations, and such a sub-query
would have an empty relid set if we flattened it. prepjointree.c contains
some baroque logic that works around this in certain special cases --- but
there is a much better answer. We can replace an empty FROM clause with a
dummy RTE that acts like a table of one row and no columns, and then there
are no such corner cases to worry about. Instead we need some logic to
get rid of useless dummy RTEs, but that's simpler and covers more cases
than what was there before.
For really trivial cases, where the query is just "SELECT expression" and
nothing else, there's a hazard that adding the extra RTE makes for a
noticeable slowdown; even though it's not much processing, there's not
that much for the planner to do overall. However testing says that the
penalty is very small, close to the noise level. In more complex queries,
this is able to find optimizations that we could not find before.
The new RTE type is called RTE_RESULT, since the "scan" plan type it
gives rise to is a Result node (the same plan we produced for a "SELECT
expression" query before). To avoid confusion, rename the old ResultPath
path type to GroupResultPath, reflecting that it's only used in degenerate
grouping cases where we know the query produces just one grouped row.
(It wouldn't work to unify the two cases, because there are different
rules about where the associated quals live during query_planner.)
Note: although this touches readfuncs.c, I don't think a catversion
bump is required, because the added case can't occur in stored rules,
only plans.
Patch by me, reviewed by David Rowley and Mark Dilger
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15944.1521127664@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
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
The heapam XLog functions are used by other modules, not all of which
are interested in the rest of the heapam API. With this, we let them
get just the XLog stuff in which they are interested and not pollute
them with unrelated includes.
Also, since heapam.h no longer requires xlog.h, many files that do
include heapam.h no longer get xlog.h automatically, including a few
headers. This is useful because heapam.h is getting pulled in by
execnodes.h, which is in turn included by a lot of files.
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).
There may be some other places where we should use errdetail_internal,
but they'll have to be evaluated case-by-case. This commit just hits
a bunch of places where invoking gettext is obviously a waste of cycles.
The recent additions for FDW support required checking foreign-table-ness
in several places in the parse/plan chain. While it's not clear whether
that would really result in a noticeable slowdown, it seems best to avoid
any performance risk by keeping a copy of the relation's relkind in
RangeTblEntry. That might have some other uses later, anyway.
Per discussion.
There are some unimplemented aspects: recursive queries must use UNION ALL
(should allow UNION too), and we don't have SEARCH or CYCLE clauses.
These might or might not get done for 8.4, but even without them it's a
pretty useful feature.
There are also a couple of small loose ends and definitional quibbles,
which I'll send a memo about to pgsql-hackers shortly. But let's land
the patch now so we can get on with other development.
Yoshiyuki Asaba, with lots of help from Tatsuo Ishii and Tom Lane
corresponding struct definitions. This allows other headers to avoid including
certain highly-loaded headers such as rel.h and relscan.h, instead using just
relcache.h, heapam.h or genam.h, which are more lightweight and thus cause less
unnecessary dependencies.
useless substructure for its RangeTblEntry nodes. (I chose to keep using the
same struct node type and just zero out the link fields for unneeded info,
rather than making a separate ExecRangeTblEntry type --- it seemed too
fragile to have two different rangetable representations.)
Along the way, put subplans into a list in the toplevel PlannedStmt node,
and have SubPlan nodes refer to them by list index instead of direct pointers.
Vadim wanted to do that years ago, but I never understood what he was on about
until now. It makes things a *whole* lot more robust, because we can stop
worrying about duplicate processing of subplans during expression tree
traversals. That's been a constant source of bugs, and it's finally gone.
There are some consequent simplifications yet to be made, like not using
a separate EState for subplans in the executor, but I'll tackle that later.
representation of equivalence classes of variables. This is an extensive
rewrite, but it brings a number of benefits:
* planner no longer fails in the presence of "incomplete" operator families
that don't offer operators for every possible combination of datatypes.
* avoid generating and then discarding redundant equality clauses.
* remove bogus assumption that derived equalities always use operators
named "=".
* mergejoins can work with a variety of sort orders (e.g., descending) now,
instead of tying each mergejoinable operator to exactly one sort order.
* better recognition of redundant sort columns.
* can make use of equalities appearing underneath an outer join.
(e.g. "INSERT ... VALUES (...), (...), ...") and elsewhere as allowed
by the spec. (e.g. similar to a FROM clause subselect). initdb required.
Joe Conway and Tom Lane.
functions are not strict, they will be called (passing a NULL first parameter)
during any attempt to input a NULL value of their datatype. Currently, all
our input functions are strict and so this commit does not change any
behavior. However, this will make it possible to build domain input functions
that centralize checking of domain constraints, thereby closing numerous holes
in our domain support, as per previous discussion.
While at it, I took the opportunity to introduce convenience functions
InputFunctionCall, OutputFunctionCall, etc to use in code that calls I/O
functions. This eliminates a lot of grotty-looking casts, but the main
motivation is to make it easier to grep for these places if we ever need
to touch them again.
only one argument. (Per recent discussion, the option to accept multiple
arguments is pretty useless for user-defined types, and would be a likely
source of security holes if it was used.) Simplify call sites of
output/send functions to not bother passing more than one argument.
scans, using in-memory tuple ID bitmaps as the intermediary. The planner
frontend (path creation and cost estimation) is not there yet, so none
of this code can be executed. I have tested it using some hacked planner
code that is far too ugly to see the light of day, however. Committing
now so that the bulk of the infrastructure changes go in before the tree
drifts under me.
few palloc's. I also chose to eliminate the restype and restypmod fields
entirely, since they are redundant with information stored in the node's
contained expression; re-examining the expression at need seems simpler
and more reliable than trying to keep restype/restypmod up to date.
initdb forced due to change in contents of stored rules.
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.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
of a composite type to get that type's OID as their second parameter,
in place of typelem which is useless. The actual changes are mostly
centralized in getTypeInputInfo and siblings, but I had to fix a few
places that were fetching pg_type.typelem for themselves instead of
using the lsyscache.c routines. Also, I renamed all the related variables
from 'typelem' to 'typioparam' to discourage people from assuming that
they necessarily contain array element types.
Tom Lane