1. 16 Aug, 2008 5 commits
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Fix a couple of places where psql might fail to report a suitable error · 63c3b990
      Tom Lane authored
      if PQexec returns NULL.  These don't seem significant enough to be worth
      back-patching, but they ought to get fixed ...
      63c3b990
    • Bruce Momjian's avatar
      Update Russian FAQ. · b9984ade
      Bruce Momjian authored
      corochoone@gmail.com
      b9984ade
    • Bruce Momjian's avatar
      Add new SQL training web site to FAQ: · 10c93552
      Bruce Momjian authored
          <LI><A href=
          "http://sqlzoo.net">http://sqlzoo.net</A>
          </LI>
      10c93552
    • Bruce Momjian's avatar
      21cf022f
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Clean up the loose ends in selectivity estimation left by my patch for semi · d4af2a64
      Tom Lane authored
      and anti joins.  To do this, pass the SpecialJoinInfo struct for the current
      join as an additional optional argument to operator join selectivity
      estimation functions.  This allows the estimator to tell not only what kind
      of join is being formed, but which variable is on which side of the join;
      a requirement long recognized but not dealt with till now.  This also leaves
      the door open for future improvements in the estimators, such as accounting
      for the null-insertion effects of lower outer joins.  I didn't do anything
      about that in the current patch but the information is in principle deducible
      from what's passed.
      
      The patch also clarifies the definition of join selectivity for semi/anti
      joins: it's the fraction of the left input that has (at least one) match
      in the right input.  This allows getting rid of some very fuzzy thinking
      that I had committed in the original 7.4-era IN-optimization patch.
      There's probably room to estimate this better than the present patch does,
      but at least we know what to estimate.
      
      Since I had to touch CREATE OPERATOR anyway to allow a variant signature
      for join estimator functions, I took the opportunity to add a couple of
      additional checks that were missing, per my recent message to -hackers:
      * Check that estimator functions return float8;
      * Require execute permission at the time of CREATE OPERATOR on the
      operator's function as well as the estimator functions;
      * Require ownership of any pre-existing operator that's modified by
      the command.
      I also moved the lookup of the functions out of OperatorCreate() and
      into operatorcmds.c, since that seemed more consistent with most of
      the other catalog object creation processes, eg CREATE TYPE.
      d4af2a64
  2. 15 Aug, 2008 2 commits
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Performance fix for new anti-join code in nodeMergejoin.c: after finding a · 11846111
      Tom Lane authored
      match in antijoin mode, we should advance to next outer tuple not next inner.
      We know we don't want to return this outer tuple, and there is no point in
      advancing over matching inner tuples now, because we'd just have to do it
      again if the next outer tuple has the same merge key.  This makes a noticeable
      difference if there are lots of duplicate keys in both inputs.
      
      Similarly, after finding a match in semijoin mode, arrange to advance to
      the next outer tuple after returning the current match; or immediately,
      if it fails the extra quals.  The rationale is the same.  (This is a
      performance bug in existing releases; perhaps worth back-patching?  The
      planner tries to avoid using mergejoin with lots of duplicates, so it may
      not be a big issue in practice.)
      
      Nestloop and hash got this right to start with, but I made some cosmetic
      adjustments there to make the corresponding bits of logic look more similar.
      11846111
    • Magnus Hagander's avatar
      Make the temporary directory for pgstat files configurable by the GUC · 5b8eb2b4
      Magnus Hagander authored
      variable stats_temp_directory, instead of requiring the admin to
      mount/symlink the pg_stat_tmp directory manually.
      
      For now the config variable is PGC_POSTMASTER. Room for further improvment
      that would allow it to be changed on-the-fly.
      5b8eb2b4
  3. 14 Aug, 2008 4 commits
  4. 13 Aug, 2008 1 commit
  5. 12 Aug, 2008 2 commits
  6. 11 Aug, 2008 2 commits
    • Heikki Linnakangas's avatar
      Relation forks patch requires a catversion bump due to changes in the format · a879443e
      Heikki Linnakangas authored
      of some WAL records, and two-phase state files, which I forgot.
      a879443e
    • Heikki Linnakangas's avatar
      Introduce the concept of relation forks. An smgr relation can now consist · 3f0e808c
      Heikki Linnakangas authored
      of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
      
      The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
      ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
      smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
      still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
      modified to call smgrclose instead.
      
      This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
      infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
      are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
      memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
      VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
      3f0e808c
  7. 10 Aug, 2008 1 commit
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Fix corner-case bug introduced with HOT: if REINDEX TABLE pg_class (or a · eca13886
      Tom Lane authored
      REINDEX DATABASE including same) is done before a session has done any other
      update on pg_class, the pg_class relcache entry was left with an incorrect
      setting of rd_indexattr, because the indexed-attributes set would be first
      demanded at a time when we'd forced a partial list of indexes into the
      pg_class entry, and it would remain cached after that.  This could result
      in incorrect decisions about HOT-update safety later in the same session.
      In practice, since only pg_class_relname_nsp_index would be missed out,
      only ALTER TABLE RENAME and ALTER TABLE SET SCHEMA could trigger a problem.
      Per report and test case from Ondrej Jirman.
      eca13886
  8. 08 Aug, 2008 1 commit
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Install checks in executor startup to ensure that the tuples produced by an · 30fd8ec7
      Tom Lane authored
      INSERT or UPDATE will match the target table's current rowtype.  In pre-8.3
      releases inconsistency can arise with stale cached plans, as reported by
      Merlin Moncure.  (We patched the equivalent hazard on the SELECT side in Feb
      2007; I'm not sure why we thought there was no risk on the insertion side.)
      In 8.3 and HEAD this problem should be impossible due to plan cache
      invalidation management, but it seems prudent to make the check anyway.
      
      Back-patch as far as 8.0.  7.x versions lack ALTER COLUMN TYPE, so there
      seems no way to abuse a stale plan comparably.
      30fd8ec7
  9. 07 Aug, 2008 3 commits
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Improve INTERSECT/EXCEPT hashing by realizing that we don't need to make any · af95d7aa
      Tom Lane authored
      hashtable entries for tuples that are found only in the second input: they
      can never contribute to the output.  Furthermore, this implies that the
      planner should endeavor to put first the smaller (in number of groups) input
      relation for an INTERSECT.  Implement that, and upgrade prepunion's estimation
      of the number of rows returned by setops so that there's some amount of sanity
      in the estimate of which one is smaller.
      af95d7aa
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Support hashing for duplicate-elimination in INTERSECT and EXCEPT queries. · 368df304
      Tom Lane authored
      This completes my project of improving usage of hashing for duplicate
      elimination (aggregate functions with DISTINCT remain undone, but that's
      for some other day).
      
      As with the previous patches, this means we can INTERSECT/EXCEPT on datatypes
      that can hash but not sort, and it means that INTERSECT/EXCEPT without ORDER
      BY are no longer certain to produce sorted output.
      368df304
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Teach the system how to use hashing for UNION. (INTERSECT/EXCEPT will follow, · 2d1d96b1
      Tom Lane authored
      but seem like a separate patch since most of the remaining work is on the
      executor side.)  I took the opportunity to push selection of the grouping
      operators for set operations into the parser where it belongs.  Otherwise this
      is just a small exercise in making prepunion.c consider both alternatives.
      
      As with the recent DISTINCT patch, this means we can UNION on datatypes that
      can hash but not sort, and it means that UNION without ORDER BY is no longer
      certain to produce sorted output.
      2d1d96b1
  10. 05 Aug, 2008 7 commits
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Do not allow Unique nodes to be scanned backwards. The code claimed that it · 3d40d5e7
      Tom Lane authored
      would work, but in fact it didn't return the same rows when moving backwards
      as when moving forwards.  This would have no visible effect in a DISTINCT
      query (at least assuming the column datatypes use a strong definition of
      equality), but it gave entirely wrong answers for DISTINCT ON queries.
      3d40d5e7
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Department of second thoughts: fix newly-added code in planner.c to make real · c78248c9
      Tom Lane authored
      sure that DISTINCT ON does what it's supposed to, ie, sort by the full ORDER
      BY list before unique-ifying.  The error seems masked in simple cases by the
      fact that query_planner won't return query pathkeys that only partially match
      the requested sort order, but I wouldn't want to bet that it couldn't be
      exposed in some way or other.
      c78248c9
    • Tom Lane's avatar
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      In ReadOrZeroBuffer (and related entry points), don't bother to call · d8b04d5f
      Tom Lane authored
      PageHeaderIsValid when we zero the buffer instead of reading the page in.
      The actual performance improvement is probably marginal since this function
      isn't very heavily used, but a cycle saved is a cycle earned.
      
      Zdenek Kotala
      d8b04d5f
    • Magnus Hagander's avatar
      Move pgstat.tmp into a temporary directory under $PGDATA named pg_stat_tmp. · 70d75697
      Magnus Hagander authored
      This allows the use of a ramdrive (either through mount or symlink) for
      the temporary file that's written every half second, which should
      reduce I/O.
      
      On server shutdown/startup, the file is written to the old location in
      the global directory, to preserve data across restarts.
      
      Bump catversion since the $PGDATA directory layout changed.
      70d75697
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Fix some message style guideline violations in pg_regress, as well as · 7e61edf2
      Tom Lane authored
      some failures to expose messages for translation.
      7e61edf2
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Improve SELECT DISTINCT to consider hash aggregation, as well as sort/uniq, · be3b265c
      Tom Lane authored
      as methods for implementing the DISTINCT step.  This eliminates the former
      performance gap between DISTINCT and GROUP BY, and also makes it possible
      to do SELECT DISTINCT on datatypes that only support hashing not sorting.
      
      SELECT DISTINCT ON is still always implemented by sorting; it would take
      executor changes to support hashing that, and it's not clear it's worth
      the trouble.
      
      This is a release-note-worthy incompatibility from previous PG versions,
      since SELECT DISTINCT can no longer be counted on to deliver sorted output
      without explicitly saying ORDER BY.  (Anyone who can't cope with that
      can consider turning off enable_hashagg.)
      
      Several regression test queries needed to have ORDER BY added to preserve
      stable output order.  I fixed the ones that manifested here, but there
      might be some other cases that show up on other platforms.
      be3b265c
  11. 04 Aug, 2008 1 commit
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Improve CREATE/DROP/RENAME DATABASE so that when failing because the source · 4abd7b49
      Tom Lane authored
      or target database is being accessed by other users, it tells you whether
      the "other users" are live sessions or uncommitted prepared transactions.
      (Indeed, it tells you exactly how many of each, but that's mostly just
      because it was easy to do so.)  This should help forestall the gotcha of
      not realizing that a prepared transaction is what's blocking the command.
      Per discussion.
      4abd7b49
  12. 03 Aug, 2008 3 commits
  13. 02 Aug, 2008 1 commit
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Rearrange the querytree representation of ORDER BY/GROUP BY/DISTINCT items · 95113047
      Tom Lane authored
      as per my recent proposal:
      
      1. Fold SortClause and GroupClause into a single node type SortGroupClause.
      We were already relying on them to be struct-equivalent, so using two node
      tags wasn't accomplishing much except to get in the way of comparing items
      with equal().
      
      2. Add an "eqop" field to SortGroupClause to carry the associated equality
      operator.  This is cheap for the parser to get at the same time it's looking
      up the sort operator, and storing it eliminates the need for repeated
      not-so-cheap lookups during planning.  In future this will also let us
      represent GROUP/DISTINCT operations on datatypes that have hash opclasses
      but no btree opclasses (ie, they have equality but no natural sort order).
      The previous representation simply didn't work for that, since its only
      indicator of comparison semantics was a sort operator.
      
      3. Add a hasDistinctOn boolean to struct Query to explicitly record whether
      the distinctClause came from DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON.  This allows removing
      some complicated and not 100% bulletproof code that attempted to figure
      that out from the distinctClause alone.
      
      This patch doesn't in itself create any new capability, but it's necessary
      infrastructure for future attempts to use hash-based grouping for DISTINCT
      and UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT.
      95113047
  14. 01 Aug, 2008 4 commits
  15. 31 Jul, 2008 3 commits
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Fix parser so that we don't modify the user-written ORDER BY list in order · 63247bec
      Tom Lane authored
      to represent DISTINCT or DISTINCT ON.  This gets rid of a longstanding
      annoyance that a view or rule using SELECT DISTINCT will be dumped out
      with an overspecified ORDER BY list, and is one small step along the way
      to decoupling DISTINCT and ORDER BY enough so that hash-based implementation
      of DISTINCT will be possible.  In passing, improve transformDistinctClause
      so that it doesn't reject duplicate DISTINCT ON items, as was reported by
      Steve Midgley a couple weeks ago.
      63247bec
    • Bruce Momjian's avatar
      Add URL to: · b1fb3b2a
      Bruce Momjian authored
      * Consider decreasing the I/O caused by updating tuple hint bits
      
      >   http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2008-07/msg00199.php
      b1fb3b2a
    • Tom Lane's avatar
      Require superuser privilege to create base types (but not composites, enums, · 7bd7b200
      Tom Lane authored
      or domains).  This was already effectively required because you had to own
      the I/O functions, and the I/O functions pretty much have to be written in
      C since we don't let PL functions take or return cstring.  But given the
      possible security consequences of a malicious type definition, it seems
      prudent to enforce superuser requirement directly.  Per recent discussion.
      7bd7b200