Re: [HACKERS] Secondary index access optimizations

On 12 September 2018 at 08:32, Konstantin Knizhnik
<k(dot)knizhnik(at)postgrespro(dot)ru> wrote:
> Also the patch proposed by you is much simple and does mostly the same. Yes,
> it is not covering CHECK constraints,
> but as far as partitioning becomes now standard in Postgres, I do not think
> that much people will use old inheritance mechanism and CHECK constraints.
> In any case, there are now many optimizations which works only for
> partitions, but not for inherited tables.

I've not had time to look at your updated patch yet, but one thing I
thought about after my initial review, imagine you have a setup like:

create table listp (a int, b int) partition by list(a);
create table listp1 partition of listp for values in(1);
create index listp_a_b_idx on listp (a,b);

and a query:

select * from listp where a = 1 order by b;

if we remove the "a = 1" qual, then listp_a_b_idx can't be used.

I didn't test this in your patch, but I guess since the additional
quals are not applied to the children in set_append_rel_size() that by
the time set_append_rel_pathlist() is called, then when we go
generating the paths, the (a,b) index won't be any good.

Perhaps there's some workaround like inventing some sort of "no-op"
qual that exists in planning but never makes it way down to scans.
Although I admit to not having fully thought that idea through.

--
David Rowley http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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