• Tom Lane's avatar
    Restructure code that is responsible for ensuring that clauseless joins are · 6bef118b
    Tom Lane authored
    considered when it is necessary to do so because of a join-order restriction
    (that is, an outer-join or IN-subselect construct).  The former coding was a
    bit ad-hoc and inconsistent, and it missed some cases, as exposed by Mario
    Weilguni's recent bug report.  His specific problem was that an IN could be
    turned into a "clauseless" join due to constant-propagation removing the IN's
    joinclause, and if the IN's subselect involved more than one relation and
    there was more than one such IN linking to the same upper relation, then the
    only valid join orders involve "bushy" plans but we would fail to consider the
    specific paths needed to get there.  (See the example case added to the join
    regression test.)  On examining the code I wonder if there weren't some other
    problem cases too; in particular it seems that GEQO was defending against a
    different set of corner cases than the main planner was.  There was also an
    efficiency problem, in that when we did realize we needed a clauseless join
    because of an IN, we'd consider clauseless joins against every other relation
    whether this was sensible or not.  It seems a better design is to use the
    outer-join and in-clause lists as a backup heuristic, just as the rule of
    joining only where there are joinclauses is a heuristic: we'll join two
    relations if they have a usable joinclause *or* this might be necessary to
    satisfy an outer-join or IN-clause join order restriction.  I refactored the
    code to have just one place considering this instead of three, and made sure
    that it covered all the cases that any of them had been considering.
    
    Backpatch as far as 8.1 (which has only the IN-clause form of the disease).
    By rights 8.0 and 7.4 should have the bug too, but they accidentally fail
    to fail, because the joininfo structure used in those releases preserves some
    memory of there having once been a joinclause between the inner and outer
    sides of an IN, and so it leads the code in the right direction anyway.
    I'll be conservative and not touch them.
    6bef118b
join_1.out 66.1 KB