Re: Get rid of runtime handling of AlternativeSubPlan?

David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Do you feel that the choice to create_plan() on the subplan before
> planning the outer query is still a good one? ISTM that that was
> required when the AlternativeSubplan decision was made during
> execution, since we, of course, need a plan to execute. If the
> decision is now being made in the planner then is it not better to
> delay the create_plan() until later in planning?

Hm. That's well outside the scope I had in mind for this patch.
In principle, you're right that we could postpone final planning
of the subquery till later; but I fear it'd require quite a lot
of refactoring to make it work that way. There's a lot of rather
subtle timing dependencies in the processing done by createplan.c
and setrefs.c, so I think this might be a lot more painful than
it seems at first glance. And we'd only gain anything in cases that
use AlternativeSubPlan, which is a minority of subplans, so on the
whole I rather doubt it's worth the trouble.

One inefficiency I see that we could probably get rid of is
where make_subplan() is doing

/* Now we can check if it'll fit in hash_mem */
/* XXX can we check this at the Path stage? */
if (subplan_is_hashable(plan))
{

The only inputs subplan_is_hashable needs are the predicted rowcount
and output width, which surely we could get from the Path. So we
could save doing create_plan() when we decide the subquery output is
too big to hash. OTOH, that's probably a pretty small minority of
use-cases, so it might not be worth troubling over.

regards, tom lane