Re: [PERFORM] Constraint exclusion on UNION ALL subqueries with WHERE conditions

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gunnlaugur_=DE=F3r_Briem?= <gunnlaugur(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Monday, September 19, 2011 3:59:30 AM UTC, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Works for me in 8.4.8. Do you have constraint_exclusion set to ON?

> I did try with constraint_exclusion set to on, though the docs suggest partition should be enough ("examine constraints only for ... UNION ALL subqueries")

> Here's a minimal test case (which I should have supplied in the original post, sorry), tried just now in 8.4.8:

> CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW v_heavy_view
> AS SELECT (random()*1e5)::integer col
> FROM generate_series(1, 1e6::integer);

> CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW v_test_constraint_exclusion AS
> SELECT col FROM v_heavy_view WHERE col < 3
> UNION ALL SELECT col FROM v_heavy_view WHERE col >= 3;

> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM v_test_constraint_exclusion WHERE col=2;

Hmm. The reason this particular case doesn't work is that we don't
apply relation_excluded_by_constraints() to functions-in-FROM.
It's only used for plain-table RTEs, not subqueries, functions,
etc. I suspect the complainant's real case involved an unflattenable
subquery.

Probably the rationale for that coding was that only plain tables
could have CHECK constraints; but the portion of the logic that looks
for mutually contradictory scan constraints could apply to non-table
relations.

Should we change the code to make such checks in these cases?
The default behavior (with constraint_exclusion = partition) would
still be to do nothing extra, but it would add planning expense when
constraint_exclusion = on.

regards, tom lane