po 5. 12. 2022 v 5:28 odesílatel Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> napsal:
Peifeng Qiu <pgsql@qiupf.dev> writes: >> the need for this code seems not that great. But as to the code itself I'm unable to properly judge.
> A simplified version of my use case is like this: > CREATE FOREIGN TABLE ft(rawdata json); > INSERT INTO tbl SELECT (convert_func(rawdata)).* FROM ft;
It might be worth noting that the code as we got it from Berkeley could do this scenario without multiple evaluations of convert_func(). Memory is foggy, but I believe it involved essentially a two-level targetlist. Unfortunately, the scheme was impossibly baroque and buggy, so we eventually ripped it out altogether in favor of the multiple-evaluation behavior you see today. I think that commit 62e29fe2e might have been what ripped it out, but I'm not quite sure. It's about the right time-frame, anyway.
I mention this because trying to reverse-engineer this situation in execExpr seems seriously ugly and inefficient, even assuming you can make it non-buggy. The right solution has to involve never expanding foo().* into duplicate function calls in the first place, which is the way it used to be. Maybe if you dug around in those twenty-year-old changes you could get some inspiration.
I tend to agree with David that LATERAL offers a good-enough solution in most cases ... but it is annoying that we accept this syntax and then pessimize it.
I agree, so there is a perfect solution like don't use .*, but on second hand any supported syntax should be optimized well or we should raise some warning about negative performance impact.
Today there are a lot of baroque technologies in the stack so it is hard to remember all good practices and it is hard for newbies to take this knowledge. We should reduce possible performance traps when it is possible.
