Weaken the planner's tests for relevant joinclauses.
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Weaken the planner's tests for relevant joinclauses. We should be willing to cross-join two small relations if that allows us to use an inner indexscan on a large relation (that is, the potential indexqual for the large table requires both smaller relations). This worked in simple cases but fell apart as soon as there was a join clause to a fourth relation, because the existence of any two-relation join clause caused the planner to not consider clauseless joins between other base relations. The added regression test shows an example case adapted from a recent complaint from Benoit Delbosc. Adjust have_relevant_joinclause, have_relevant_eclass_joinclause, and has_relevant_eclass_joinclause to consider that a join clause mentioning three or more relations is sufficient grounds for joining any subset of those relations, even if we have to do so via a cartesian join. Since such clauses are relatively uncommon, this shouldn't affect planning speed on typical queries; in fact it should help a bit, because the latter two functions in particular get significantly simpler. Although this is arguably a bug fix, I'm not going to risk back-patching it, since it might have currently-unforeseen consequences.
Files
| Path | Change | +/− |
|---|---|---|
| src/backend/optimizer/path/equivclass.c | modified | +19 −77 |
| src/backend/optimizer/path/joinrels.c | modified | +5 −9 |
| src/backend/optimizer/util/joininfo.c | modified | +17 −7 |
| src/test/regress/expected/join.out | modified | +51 −0 |
| src/test/regress/sql/join.sql | modified | +18 −0 |