Re: making update/delete of inheritance trees scale better

I wrote:
> Yeah, it's on my to-do list for this CF, but I expect it's going to
> take some concentrated study and other things keep intruding :-(.

I've started to look at this seriously, and I wanted to make a note
about something that I think we should try to do, but there seems
little hope of shoehorning it in for v14.

That "something" is that ideally, the ModifyTable node should pass
only the updated column values to the table AM or FDW, and let that
lower-level code worry about reconstructing a full tuple by
re-fetching the unmodified columns. When I first proposed this
concept, I'd imagined that maybe we could avoid the additional tuple
read that this implementation requires by combining it with the
tuple access that a heap UPDATE must do anyway to lock and outdate
the target tuple. Another example of a possible win is Andres'
comment upthread that a columnar-storage AM would really rather
deal only with the modified columns. Also, the patch as it stands
asks FDWs to supply all columns in a whole-row junk var, which is
something that might become unnecessary.

However, there are big stumbling blocks in the way. ModifyTable
is responsible for applying CHECK constraints, which may require
looking at the values of not-modified columns. An even bigger
problem is that per-row triggers currently expect to be given
the whole proposed row (and to be able to change columns not
already marked for update). We could imagine redefining the
trigger APIs to reduce the overhead here, but that's certainly
not going to happen in time for v14.

So for now I think we have to stick with Amit's design of
reconstructing the full updated tuple at the outset in
ModifyTable, and then proceeding pretty much as updates
have done in the past. But there's more we can do later.

regards, tom lane