Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it's legal.

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Commit: 0901dbab338f3161b50c4c60ef669ed393c9e308
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2014-04-29T17:12:33Z
Releases: 9.2.9
Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it's legal.

In general we can't discard constant-NULL inputs, since they could change
the result of the AND/OR to be NULL.  But at top level of WHERE, we do not
need to distinguish a NULL result from a FALSE result, so it's okay to
treat NULL as FALSE and then simplify AND/OR accordingly.

This is a very ancient oversight, but in 9.2 and later it can lead to
failure to optimize queries that previous releases did optimize, as a
result of more aggressive parameter substitution rules making it possible
to reduce more subexpressions to NULL constants.  This is the root cause of
bug #10171 from Arnold Scheffler.  We could alternatively have fixed that
by teaching orclauses.c to ignore constant-NULL OR arms, but it seems
better to get rid of them globally.

I resisted the temptation to back-patch this change into all active
branches, but it seems appropriate to back-patch as far as 9.2 so that
there will not be performance regressions of the kind shown in this bug.

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