Horton

Re: generic plans and "initial" pruning

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

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From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com>, Tender Wang <tndrwang@gmail.com>, Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>, Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Thom Brown <thom@linux.com>
Date: 2025-05-22T13:50:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 11:38 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I still like the core idea of deferring locking, but I don't like
> anything about this implementation of it.  It seems like there has
> to be a better and simpler way.

Without particularly defending this implementation, and certainly
without defending its bugs, I just want to say that I'm not convinced
by the idea that there has to be a better and simpler way. We --
principally Amit, but also me and you and others -- have been trying
to find the best way of doing this for probably 5 years now. If you do
something during executor startup, you have to be prepared for
executor startup to force a replan, and if you do something before
executor startup, then you're duplicating executor logic into a new
phase that needs to communicate its results forward to execution
proper. Either approach is awkward and that awkwardness seems to
inevitably bleed into the plan cache specifically. I'd be beyond
delighted if you want to help chart a path through the awkwardness
here, since you know this stuff better than anybody, but I am
skeptical that there is a truly marvelous approach which we've just
managed to overlook for all this time.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

Commits

  1. Stamp 19beta1.

  2. Revert "Don't lock partitions pruned by initial pruning"

  3. Ensure first ModifyTable rel initialized if all are pruned

  4. Fix bug in cbc127917 to handle nested Append correctly

  5. Remove unstable test suite added by 525392d57

  6. Don't lock partitions pruned by initial pruning

  7. Fix an oversight in cbc127917 to handle MERGE correctly

  8. Track unpruned relids to avoid processing pruned relations

  9. Perform runtime initial pruning outside ExecInitNode()

  10. Move PartitionPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt

  11. Fix setrefs.c's failure to do expression processing on prune steps.

  12. Remove obsolete executor cleanup code

  13. Revert "Move PartitionPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt"

  14. Move PartitioPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt

  15. Refactor and cleanup runtime partition prune code a little

  16. Remove some unnecessary fields from Plan trees.

  17. Remove more redundant relation locking during executor startup.

  18. Shut down Gather's children before shutting down Gather itself.