pgsql: Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it'

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-committers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: pgsql: Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it'
Date: 2014-04-29 17:13:03
Message-ID: E1WfBaZ-0001nk-53@gemulon.postgresql.org
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Improve planner to drop constant-NULL inputs of AND/OR where it's legal.

In general we can't discard constant-NULL inputs, since they could change
the result of the AND/OR to be NULL. But at top level of WHERE, we do not
need to distinguish a NULL result from a FALSE result, so it's okay to
treat NULL as FALSE and then simplify AND/OR accordingly.

This is a very ancient oversight, but in 9.2 and later it can lead to
failure to optimize queries that previous releases did optimize, as a
result of more aggressive parameter substitution rules making it possible
to reduce more subexpressions to NULL constants. This is the root cause of
bug #10171 from Arnold Scheffler. We could alternatively have fixed that
by teaching orclauses.c to ignore constant-NULL OR arms, but it seems
better to get rid of them globally.

I resisted the temptation to back-patch this change into all active
branches, but it seems appropriate to back-patch as far as 9.2 so that
there will not be performance regressions of the kind shown in this bug.

Branch
------
REL9_3_STABLE

Details
-------
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/150a44e83d7559000aa9578d60c8906cae097f78

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/optimizer/prep/prepqual.c | 79 +++++++++++++++++++++++-----
src/test/regress/expected/create_index.out | 11 ++++
src/test/regress/sql/create_index.sql | 7 +++
3 files changed, 85 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

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