Re: [PATCHES] Re: BUG #4070: Join more then ~15 tables let postgreSQL produces wrong data

Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> On second thought, expanding AttrNumber to int32, wholesale, might not
>> be a good idea,
>
> No, it wouldn't. For one thing it'd be a protocol break --- column
> numbers are int16 ---

I wasn't planning to change that.

> and for another, we'd have terrible performance
> problems with such wide rows.

Yes, we probably would :-). Though if there's any nasty O(n^2) behavior
left in there, we should look at optimizing it anyway to speed up more
reasonably sized queries, in the range of a few hundred columns.

> Actually rows are supposed to be limited
> to ~1600 columns, anyway, because of HeapTupleHeader limitations.

The trick is that that limitation doesn't apply to the intermediate
virtual tuples we move around in the executor. Those are just arrays of
Datums, and can have more than MaxTupleAttributeNumber attributes, as
long as you project away enough attributes, bringing it below that
limit, before returning it to the client or materializing it into a
HeapTuple or MinimalTuple in the executor.

> Apparently you've found a path where that restriction isn't enforced
> correctly, but I haven't seen the referenced message yet ...

Enforcing the limit for virtual tuples as well, and checking for the
limit in the planner is one option, but it would cripple the ability to
join extremely wide tables. For example, if you had 10 tables with 200
columns each, you couldn't join them together even for the purposes of
COUNT(*). Granted, that's not a very common thing to do, this is the
first time this bug is reported after all, but I'd prefer to keep the
capability if possible.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com