• Tom Lane's avatar
    Repair issues with faulty generation of merge-append plans. · 24c19e9f
    Tom Lane authored
    create_merge_append_plan failed to honor the CP_EXACT_TLIST flag:
    it would generate the expected targetlist but then it felt free to
    add resjunk sort targets to it.  This demonstrably leads to assertion
    failures in v11 and HEAD, and it's probably just accidental that we
    don't see the same in older branches.  I've not looked into whether
    there would be any real-world consequences in non-assert builds.
    In HEAD, create_append_plan has sprouted the same problem, so fix
    that too (although we do not have any test cases that seem able to
    reach that bug).  This is an oversight in commit 3fc6e2d7 which
    invented the CP_EXACT_TLIST flag, so back-patch to 9.6 where that
    came in.
    
    convert_subquery_pathkeys would create pathkeys for subquery output
    values if they match any EquivalenceClass known in the outer query
    and are available in the subquery's syntactic targetlist.  However,
    the second part of that condition is wrong, because such values might
    not appear in the subquery relation's reltarget list, which would
    mean that they couldn't be accessed above the level of the subquery
    scan.  We must check that they appear in the reltarget list, instead.
    This can lead to dropping knowledge about the subquery's sort
    ordering, but I believe it's okay, because any sort key that the
    outer query actually has any interest in would appear in the
    reltarget list.
    
    This second issue is of very long standing, but right now there's no
    evidence that it causes observable problems before 9.6, so I refrained
    from back-patching further than that.  We can revisit that choice if
    somebody finds a way to make it cause problems in older branches.
    (Developing useful test cases for these issues is really problematic;
    fixing convert_subquery_pathkeys removes the only known way to exhibit
    the create_merge_append_plan bug, and neither of the test cases added
    by this patch causes a problem in all branches, even when considering
    the issues separately.)
    
    The second issue explains bug #15795 from Suresh Kumar R ("could not
    find pathkey item to sort" with nested DISTINCT queries).  I stumbled
    across the first issue while investigating that.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15795-fadb56c8e44ee73c@postgresql.org
    24c19e9f
union.sql 11.5 KB