Re: POC, WIP: OR-clause support for indexes

On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 2:28 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 1:47 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> > I agree, with the proviso that "avoid gratuitous failures" should
> > include cases where a query that got the optimization suddenly fails
> > to get the optimization, due only to some very innocuous looking
> > change. Such as a change from using a constant 1_000_000_000 to a
> > constant 5_000_000_000 in the query text. That is a POLA violation.
>
> Nope, I don't agree with that at all. If you imagine that we can
> either have the optimization apply to one of those cases on the other,
> or on the other hand we can have some cases that outright fail, I
> think it's entirely clear that the former is better.

I'm just saying that not having the optimization apply to a query very
similar to one where it does apply is a POLA violation. That's another
kind of failure, for all practical purposes. Weird performance cliffs
like that are bad. It's very easy to imagine code that generates a
query text, that at some point randomly and mysteriously gets a
sequential scan. Or a much less efficient index scan.

> I was assuming this patch shouldn't be changing the way indexes work
> at all, just making use of the facilities that we have today. More
> could be done, but that might make it harder to get anything
> committed.

I was just pointing out that there is currently no good way to make
nbtree efficiently execute a qual "WHERE a = 5 OR a IS NULL", which is
almost entirely (though not quite entirely) due to a lack of any way
of expressing that idea through SQL, in a way that'll get pushed down
to the index scan node. You can write "WHERE a = any('{5,NULL')", of
course, but that doesn't treat NULL as just another array element to
match against via an IS NULL qual (due to NULL semantics).

Yeah, this is nonessential. But it's quite a nice optimization, and
seems entirely doable within the framework of the patch. It would be a
natural follow-up.

All that I'd need on the nbtree side is to get an input scan key that
directly embodies "WHERE mycol = 5 OR mycol IS NULL". That would
probably just be a scan key with sk_flags "SK_SEARCHARRAY |
SK_SEARCHNULL", that was otherwise identical to the current
SK_SEARCHARRAY scan keys.

Adopting the nbtree array index scan code to work with this would be
straightforward. SK_SEARCHNULL scan keys basically already work like
regular equality scan keys at execution time, so all that this
optimization requires on the nbtree side is teaching
_bt_advance_array_keys to treat NULL as a distinct array condition
(evaluated as IS NULL, not as = NULL).

> It's even possible, in my mind at least, that the patch is already
> doing exactly the right things here. Even if it isn't, the problem
> doesn't seem to be fundamental, because if this example can work (and
> it does) then what the patch is trying to do should be workable, too.
> We just have to make sure we're plugging all the pieces properly
> together, and that we have comments adequately explain what is
> happening and test cases that verify it. My feeling is that the patch
> doesn't meet that standard today, but I think that just means it needs
> some more work. I'm not arguing we have to throw the whole thing out,
> or invent a lot of new infrastructure, or anything like that.

I feel like my point about the potential for POLA violations is pretty
much just common sense. I'm not particular about the exact mechanism
by which we avoid it; only that we avoid it.


--
Peter Geoghegan