• Tom Lane's avatar
    Move resolution of AlternativeSubPlan choices to the planner. · 41efb834
    Tom Lane authored
    When commit bd3dadda introduced AlternativeSubPlans, I had some
    ambitions towards allowing the choice of subplan to change during
    execution.  That has not happened, or even been thought about, in the
    ensuing twelve years; so it seems like a failed experiment.  So let's
    rip that out and resolve the choice of subplan at the end of planning
    (in setrefs.c) rather than during executor startup.  This has a number
    of positive benefits:
    
    * Removal of a few hundred lines of executor code, since
    AlternativeSubPlans need no longer be supported there.
    
    * Removal of executor-startup overhead (particularly, initialization
    of subplans that won't be used).
    
    * Removal of incidental costs of having a larger plan tree, such as
    tree-scanning and copying costs in the plancache; not to mention
    setrefs.c's own costs of processing the discarded subplans.
    
    * EXPLAIN no longer has to print a weird (and undocumented)
    representation of an AlternativeSubPlan choice; it sees only the
    subplan actually used.  This should mean less confusion for users.
    
    * Since setrefs.c knows which subexpression of a plan node it's
    working on at any instant, it's possible to adjust the estimated
    number of executions of the subplan based on that.  For example,
    we should usually estimate more executions of a qual expression
    than a targetlist expression.  The implementation used here is
    pretty simplistic, because we don't want to expend a lot of cycles
    on the issue; but it's better than ignoring the point entirely,
    as the executor had to.
    
    That last point might possibly result in shifting the choice
    between hashed and non-hashed EXISTS subplans in a few cases,
    but in general this patch isn't meant to change planner choices.
    Since we're doing the resolution so late, it's really impossible
    to change any plan choices outside the AlternativeSubPlan itself.
    
    Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley for review.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1992952.1592785225@sss.pgh.pa.us
    41efb834
execExpr.c 100 KB