Re: Removing unneeded self joins - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Hywel Carver
Subject Re: Removing unneeded self joins
Date
Msg-id CAFcA2FZA4MDp4wYguZtMt=5fZrvcGM4duMyriP210NKnVCETtw@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: Removing unneeded self joins  (Andrey Lepikhov <a.lepikhov@postgrespro.ru>)
Responses Re: Removing unneeded self joins  (Andrey Lepikhov <a.lepikhov@postgrespro.ru>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 2:20 PM Andrey Lepikhov <a.lepikhov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
On 2/7/21 01:56, Hywel Carver wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 12:21 PM Andrey Lepikhov
> <a.lepikhov@postgrespro.ru <mailto:a.lepikhov@postgrespro.ru>> wrote:
>     I think, here we could ask more general question: do we want to
>     remove a
>     'IS NOT NULL' clause from the clause list if the rest of the list
>     implicitly implies it?
>
>
> My suggestion was not to remove it, but to avoid adding it in the first
> place. When your optimisation has found a join on a group of columns
> under a uniqueness constraint, you would do something like this (forgive
> the pseudo-code)
>
> foreach(column, join_clause) {
>    if(column.nullable) { // This condition is what I'm suggesting is added
>      add_null_test(column, IS_NOT_NULL);
>    }
> }
>
> But it may be that that's not possible or practical at this point in the
> code.
I think, such option will require to implement a new machinery to prove
that arbitrary column couldn't produce NULL value.

Got it, and it makes sense to me that this would be out of scope for this change.

I remember in the previous conversation about this, Tomas acknowledged that while there are some silly queries that would benefit from this change, there are also some well-written ones (e.g. properly denormalised table structures, with decomposed views that need joining together in some queries). So the optimization needs to be essentially free to run to minimise impact on other queries.

Looking through the email chain, a previous version of this patch added ~0.6% to planning time in the worst case tested - does that meet the "essentially free" requirement?

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