Re: [HACKERS] [PATCH] Caching for stable expressions with constant arguments v3

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 12:25 PM Marti Raudsepp <marti(at)juffo(dot)org> wrote:
> Ah, one more trick for testing this patch: if you build with
> -DDEBUG_CACHEEXPR=1 then EXPLAIN VERBOSE displays cached
> subexpressions between a CACHE[...] marker.

Unless I missed something, this 2011 thread is the latest one about
this patch, and the patch was never applied, and nothing similar ever
got done either. Is that correct? If so, was there any particular
reason why this wasn't judged to be a good idea, or did it just not
get enough attention?

This was on my mind today because of a FDW pushdown question that came
up. Someone observed that a predicate of the form foreign_table_column
pushable_operator hairy_but_stable_expression is not pushed down. In
theory, it could be: just compute the value of
hairy_but_stable_expression locally, and then send the result across.
The trick is that it requires identifying a maximal stable
subexpression. In this case, the whole expression isn't stable,
because every row will provide a different value for
foreign_table_column, but the subexpression which is the right child
of the toplevel OpExpr is stable. Identifying that seems like it could
be somewhat expensive and I seem to vaguely recall some discussion of
that issue, but I think not on this thread. But if this patch - or
some other one - happened to inject a CacheExpr at the right place in
the plan tree, then postgres_fdw could leverage that existing
determination in a pretty straightforward way, precomputing the cached
value locally and then pushing the clause if otherwise safe.

That's also just a fringe benefit. Marti's test results show
significant speedup in all-local cases, which seem likely to benefit a
pretty broad class of queries. We'd probably have to give some thought
to how the technique would work with Andres's rewrite of expression
evaluation, but I imagine that's a solvable problem.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com