Fix PlaceHolderVar mechanism's interaction with outer joins.

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

Commit: dc9cc887b74bfa0d40829c4df66dead509fdd8f6
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2010-09-28T18:15:42Z
Releases: 8.4.5
Fix PlaceHolderVar mechanism's interaction with outer joins.

The point of a PlaceHolderVar is to allow a non-strict expression to be
evaluated below an outer join, after which its value bubbles up like a Var
and can be forced to NULL when the outer join's semantics require that.
However, there was a serious design oversight in that, namely that we
didn't ensure that there was actually a correct place in the plan tree
to evaluate the placeholder :-(.  It may be necessary to delay evaluation
of an outer join to ensure that a placeholder that should be evaluated
below the join can be evaluated there.  Per recent bug report from Kirill
Simonov.

Back-patch to 8.4 where the PlaceHolderVar mechanism was introduced.

Files