Hi,
We are trying to extend/hook into the planner so that it understands that date_trunc('minute', time) has the same ordering as time (or rather that a sort ordering on the latter is always a valid sort ordering on the former). But this question really applies to any order-preserving transform such as (time+1) vs (time).
Let's assume we can detect such cases. How do we tell the planner about it.
I see two ways of doing this:
(1) Having an EquivalenceClass with two members - the "time" and "date_trunc" member. Then the pathkey for the sort would reference this member and understand the equivalence. I think this is a pretty clean way of doing things. But this equivalence between "time" and "date_trunc" only applies to sorts. It should not apply to joins (for which EquivalenceClass is also used) because these values are not actually equivalent. They are only equivalent for sorting purposes. I know an EquivalenceClass has a ec_has_volatile field which marks the EquivalenceClass as only for sorts and not for joins. But is it an incorrect hack to set this for cases where the EquivalenceMembers are not volatile? Is there some other way as marking an EquivalenceClass as only for sorts that I am missing? Another wrinkle is that while a date_trunc sort can be safely represented by a time sort the reverse isn't true. Has there been any discussion on supporting such cases in EquivalenceClasses? I'd be happy to submit a patch to the core if people think this is worthwhile.
(2) I can create new EquivalenceClass objects and pathkeys and use planner hooks to substitute the appropriate pathkeys for doing things like finding indexes etc. I have a prototype where this works, but I just think approach 1 is much cleaner.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I am pretty new to the planner codebase and just want to avoid any obvious pitfalls.
Thanks,
Matvey Arye
