Reduce the cost of planning deeply-nested views.

tglsfdc · tglsfdc · commit 64919aaab450 · 2021-07-06T14:23:09.000-04:00
Joel Jacobson reported that deep nesting of trivial (flattenable) views results in O(N^3) growth of planning time for N-deep nesting. It turns out that a large chunk of this cost comes from copying around the "subquery" sub-tree of each view's RTE_SUBQUERY RTE. But once we have successfully flattened the subquery, we don't need that anymore, because the planner isn't going to do anything else interesting with that RTE. We already zap the subquery pointer during setrefs.c (cf. add_rte_to_flat_rtable), but it's useless baggage earlier than that too. Clearing the pointer as soon as pull_up_simple_subquery is done with the RTE reduces the cost from O(N^3) to O(N^2); which is still not great, but it's quite a lot better. Further improvements will require rethinking of the RTE data structure, which is being considered in another thread. Patch by me; thanks to Dean Rasheed for review. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/797aff54-b49b-4914-9ff9-aa42564a4d7d@www.fastmail.com
diff --git a/src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepjointree.c b/src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepjointree.c
@@ -893,10 +893,9 @@ pull_up_simple_subquery(PlannerInfo *root, Node *jtnode, RangeTblEntry *rte,
 	ListCell   *lc;
 
 	/*
-	 * Need a modifiable copy of the subquery to hack on.  Even if we didn't
-	 * sometimes choose not to pull up below, we must do this to avoid
-	 * problems if the same subquery is referenced from multiple jointree
-	 * items (which can't happen normally, but might after rule rewriting).
+	 * Make a modifiable copy of the subquery to hack on, so that the RTE will
+	 * be left unchanged in case we decide below that we can't pull it up
+	 * after all.
 	 */
 	subquery = copyObject(rte->subquery);
 
@@ -1174,6 +1173,14 @@ pull_up_simple_subquery(PlannerInfo *root, Node *jtnode, RangeTblEntry *rte,
 	Assert(root->placeholder_list == NIL);
 	Assert(subroot->placeholder_list == NIL);
 
+	/*
+	 * We no longer need the RTE's copy of the subquery's query tree.  Getting
+	 * rid of it saves nothing in particular so far as this level of query is
+	 * concerned; but if this query level is in turn pulled up into a parent,
+	 * we'd waste cycles copying the now-unused query tree.
+	 */
+	rte->subquery = NULL;
+
 	/*
 	 * Miscellaneous housekeeping.
 	 *
