3d351d916b
Historically, we've considered the state with relpages and reltuples both zero as indicating that we do not know the table's tuple density. This is problematic because it's impossible to distinguish "never yet vacuumed" from "vacuumed and seen to be empty". In particular, a user cannot use VACUUM or ANALYZE to override the planner's normal heuristic that an empty table should not be believed to be empty because it is probably about to get populated. That heuristic is a good safety measure, so I don't care to abandon it, but there should be a way to override it if the table is indeed intended to stay empty. Hence, represent the initial state of ignorance by setting reltuples to -1 (relpages is still set to zero), and apply the minimum-ten-pages heuristic only when reltuples is still -1. If the table is empty, VACUUM or ANALYZE (but not CREATE INDEX) will override that to reltuples = relpages = 0, and then we'll plan on that basis. This requires a bunch of fiddly little changes, but we can get rid of some ugly kluges that were formerly needed to maintain the old definition. One notable point is that FDWs' GetForeignRelSize methods will see baserel->tuples = -1 when no ANALYZE has been done on the foreign table. That seems like a net improvement, since those methods were formerly also in the dark about what baserel->tuples = 0 really meant. Still, it is an API change. I bumped catversion because code predating this change would get confused by seeing reltuples = -1. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/F02298E0-6EF4-49A1-BCB6-C484794D9ACC@thebuild.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.