• Tom Lane's avatar
    Support RIGHT and FULL OUTER JOIN in hash joins. · f4e4b327
    Tom Lane authored
    This is advantageous first because it allows us to hash the smaller table
    regardless of the outer-join type, and second because hash join can be more
    flexible than merge join in dealing with arbitrary join quals in a FULL
    join.  For merge join all the join quals have to be mergejoinable, but hash
    join will work so long as there's at least one hashjoinable qual --- the
    others can be any condition.  (This is true essentially because we don't
    keep per-inner-tuple match flags in merge join, while hash join can do so.)
    
    To do this, we need a has-it-been-matched flag for each tuple in the
    hashtable, not just one for the current outer tuple.  The key idea that
    makes this practical is that we can store the match flag in the tuple's
    infomask, since there are lots of bits there that are of no interest for a
    MinimalTuple.  So we aren't increasing the size of the hashtable at all for
    the feature.
    
    To write this without turning the hash code into even more of a pile of
    spaghetti than it already was, I rewrote ExecHashJoin in a state-machine
    style, similar to ExecMergeJoin.  Other than that decision, it was pretty
    straightforward.
    f4e4b327
htup.h 30.8 KB