4be058fe9e
The fact that "SELECT expression" has no base relations has long been a thorn in the side of the planner. It makes it hard to flatten a sub-query that looks like that, or is a trivial VALUES() item, because the planner generally uses relid sets to identify sub-relations, and such a sub-query would have an empty relid set if we flattened it. prepjointree.c contains some baroque logic that works around this in certain special cases --- but there is a much better answer. We can replace an empty FROM clause with a dummy RTE that acts like a table of one row and no columns, and then there are no such corner cases to worry about. Instead we need some logic to get rid of useless dummy RTEs, but that's simpler and covers more cases than what was there before. For really trivial cases, where the query is just "SELECT expression" and nothing else, there's a hazard that adding the extra RTE makes for a noticeable slowdown; even though it's not much processing, there's not that much for the planner to do overall. However testing says that the penalty is very small, close to the noise level. In more complex queries, this is able to find optimizations that we could not find before. The new RTE type is called RTE_RESULT, since the "scan" plan type it gives rise to is a Result node (the same plan we produced for a "SELECT expression" query before). To avoid confusion, rename the old ResultPath path type to GroupResultPath, reflecting that it's only used in degenerate grouping cases where we know the query produces just one grouped row. (It wouldn't work to unify the two cases, because there are different rules about where the associated quals live during query_planner.) Note: although this touches readfuncs.c, I don't think a catversion bump is required, because the added case can't occur in stored rules, only plans. Patch by me, reviewed by David Rowley and Mark Dilger Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15944.1521127664@sss.pgh.pa.us
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.