• Tom Lane's avatar
    Apply a band-aid fix for the problem that 8.2 and up completely misestimate · 0ee5a398
    Tom Lane authored
    the number of rows likely to be produced by a query such as
    	SELECT * FROM t1 LEFT JOIN t2 USING (key) WHERE t2.key IS NULL;
    What this is doing is selecting for t1 rows with no match in t2, and thus
    it may produce a significant number of rows even if the t2.key table column
    contains no nulls at all.  8.2 thinks the table column's null fraction is
    relevant and thus may estimate no rows out, which results in terrible plans
    if there are more joins above this one.  A proper fix for this will involve
    passing much more information about the context of a clause to the selectivity
    estimator functions than we ever have.  There's no time left to write such a
    patch for 8.3, and it wouldn't be back-patchable into 8.2 anyway.  Instead,
    put in an ad-hoc test to defeat the normal table-stats-based estimation when
    an IS NULL test is evaluated at an outer join, and just use a constant
    estimate instead --- I went with 0.5 for lack of a better idea.  This won't
    catch every case but it will catch the typical ways of writing such queries,
    and it seems unlikely to make things worse for other queries.
    0ee5a398
selfuncs.h 6.09 KB