When one side of the join has a NULL, we don't want to uselessly try
to match it against every remaining tuple of the other side. While
at it, rewrite the comparison machinery to avoid multiple evaluations
of the left and right input expressions and to use a btree comparator
where available, instead of double operator calls. Also revise the
state machine to eliminate redundant comparisons and hopefully make it
more readable too.
of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
