Re: start on outer join

Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> > Will apply ... some other changes laying a bit of
> > groundwork for outer joins so you can start on the planner/optimizer
> > parts :)
> Those will be a synch now that I understand the optimizer. In fact, I
> think it all will happen in the executor.

I've modified executor/nodeMergeJoin.c to walk a left/right/both outer
join, but didn't fill in the part which actually creates the result
tuple (which will be the current left- or right-side tuple plus nulls
for filler). I hope this is up your alley :)

So far, I'm not certain what to pass to the planner. The syntax leads me
to pass a select structure from gram.y with a "JoinExpr" structure in
the "fromClause" list. I need to expand that with a combination of
column names and qualifications, but at the time I see the JoinExpr I
don't have access to the top query structure itself. So I may just keep
a modestly transformed JoinExpr to expand later or to pass to the
planner.

btw, the EXCEPT/INTERSECT stuff from Stefan has some ugliness in gram.y
which needs to be fixed (the shift/reduce conflict is not acceptable for
our release version) and some of that code clearly needs to move to
analyze.c or some other module.

- Tom