• Tom Lane's avatar
    Refactor pattern_fixed_prefix() to avoid dealing in incomplete patterns. · 00dac600
    Tom Lane authored
    Previously, pattern_fixed_prefix() was defined to return whatever fixed
    prefix it could extract from the pattern, plus the "rest" of the pattern.
    That definition was sensible for LIKE patterns, but not so much for
    regexes, where reconstituting a valid pattern minus the prefix could be
    quite tricky (certainly the existing code wasn't doing that correctly).
    Since the only thing that callers ever did with the "rest" of the pattern
    was to pass it to like_selectivity() or regex_selectivity(), let's cut out
    the middle-man and just have pattern_fixed_prefix's subroutines do this
    directly.  Then pattern_fixed_prefix can return a simple selectivity
    number, and the question of how to cope with partial patterns is removed
    from its API specification.
    
    While at it, adjust the API spec so that callers who don't actually care
    about the pattern's selectivity (which is a lot of them) can pass NULL for
    the selectivity pointer to skip doing the work of computing a selectivity
    estimate.
    
    This patch is only an API refactoring that doesn't actually change any
    processing, other than allowing a little bit of useless work to be skipped.
    However, it's necessary infrastructure for my upcoming fix to regex prefix
    extraction, because after that change there won't be any simple way to
    identify the "rest" of the regex, not even to the low level of fidelity
    needed by regex_selectivity.  We can cope with that if regex_fixed_prefix
    and regex_selectivity communicate directly, but not if we have to work
    within the old API.  Hence, back-patch to all active branches.
    00dac600
selfuncs.c 209 KB