• Andres Freund's avatar
    Faster expression evaluation and targetlist projection. · b8d7f053
    Andres Freund authored
    This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
    non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
    Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
    
    This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
    future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
    
    The speed gains primarily come from:
    - non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
    - simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
      function calls
    - sharing some state between different sub-expressions
    - reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
      out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
      nearly all of the previously used linked lists
    - more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
      constant re-checks at evaluation time
    
    Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
    demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
    release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
    between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
    handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
    generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
    easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
    
    The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
    - basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
      overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
      statements.  That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
      initialization overhead is measurable.
    - optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
      work has already been made.
    - optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
      been made here too.
    
    The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
    backward-incompatible changes:
    - Function permission checks are now done during expression
      initialization, whereas previously they were done during
      execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
      previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
      different array type previously didn't perform checks.
    - The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
      during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
      every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
      doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
      ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer.  The behavior
      around might still change.
    
    Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
    	changes by Heikki Linnakangas
    Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
    b8d7f053
trigger.c 158 KB