
Historically we've printed SubPlan expression nodes as "(SubPlan N)", which is pretty uninformative. Trying to reproduce the original SQL for the subquery is still as impractical as before, and would be mighty verbose as well. However, we can still do better than that. Displaying the "testexpr" when present, and adding a keyword to indicate the SubLinkType, goes a long way toward showing what's really going on. In addition, this patch gets rid of EXPLAIN's use of "$n" to represent subplan and initplan output Params. Instead we now print "(SubPlan N).colX" or "(InitPlan N).colX" to represent the X'th output column of that subplan. This eliminates confusion with the use of "$n" to represent PARAM_EXTERN Params, and it's useful for the first part of this change because it eliminates needing some other indication of which subplan is referenced by a SubPlan that has a testexpr. In passing, this adds simple regression test coverage of the ROWCOMPARE_SUBLINK code paths, which were entirely unburdened by testing before. Tom Lane and Dean Rasheed, reviewed by Aleksander Alekseev. Thanks to Chantal Keller for raising the question of whether this area couldn't be improved. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2838538.1705692747@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.