• Andres Freund's avatar
    Introduce notion of different types of slots (without implementing them). · 1a0586de
    Andres Freund authored
    Upcoming work intends to allow pluggable ways to introduce new ways of
    storing table data. Accessing those table access methods from the
    executor requires TupleTableSlots to be carry tuples in the native
    format of such storage methods; otherwise there'll be a significant
    conversion overhead.
    
    Different access methods will require different data to store tuples
    efficiently (just like virtual, minimal, heap already require fields
    in TupleTableSlot). To allow that without requiring additional pointer
    indirections, we want to have different structs (embedding
    TupleTableSlot) for different types of slots.  Thus different types of
    slots are needed, which requires adapting creators of slots.
    
    The slot that most efficiently can represent a type of tuple in an
    executor node will often depend on the type of slot a child node
    uses. Therefore we need to track the type of slot is returned by
    nodes, so parent slots can create slots based on that.
    
    Relatedly, JIT compilation of tuple deforming needs to know which type
    of slot a certain expression refers to, so it can create an
    appropriate deforming function for the type of tuple in the slot.
    
    But not all nodes will only return one type of slot, e.g. an append
    node will potentially return different types of slots for each of its
    subplans.
    
    Therefore add function that allows to query the type of a node's
    result slot, and whether it'll always be the same type (whether it's
    fixed). This can be queried using ExecGetResultSlotOps().
    
    The scan, result, inner, outer type of slots are automatically
    inferred from ExecInitScanTupleSlot(), ExecInitResultSlot(),
    left/right subtrees respectively. If that's not correct for a node,
    that can be overwritten using new fields in PlanState.
    
    This commit does not introduce the actually abstracted implementation
    of different kind of TupleTableSlots, that will be left for a followup
    commit.  The different types of slots introduced will, for now, still
    use the same backing implementation.
    
    While this already partially invalidates the big comment in
    tuptable.h, it seems to make more sense to update it later, when the
    different TupleTableSlot implementations actually exist.
    
    Author: Ashutosh Bapat and Andres Freund, with changes by Amit Khandekar
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181105210039.hh4vvi4vwoq5ba2q@alap3.anarazel.de
    1a0586de
nodeForeignscan.c 11.2 KB