Re: making update/delete of inheritance trees scale better

Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 5:25 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ah, that makes sense. If we can invent dummy columns on the parent
>> rel, then most of what I was worrying about no longer seems very
>> worrying.

> IIUC, the idea is to have "dummy" columns in the top parent's
> reltarget for every junk TLE added to the top-level targetlist by
> child tables' FDWs that the top parent itself can't emit. But we allow
> these FDW junk TLEs to contain any arbitrary expression, not just
> plain Vars [1], so what node type are these dummy parent columns?

We'd have to group the children into groups that share the same
row-identity column type.  This is why I noted way-back-when that
it'd be a good idea to discourage FDWs from being too wild about
what they use for row identity.

(Also, just to be totally clear: I am *not* envisioning this as a
mechanism for FDWs to inject whatever computations they darn please
into query trees.  It's for the row identity needed by UPDATE/DELETE,
and nothing else.  That being the case, it's hard to understand why
the bottom-level Vars wouldn't be just plain Vars --- maybe "system
column" Vars or something like that, but still just Vars, not
expressions.)

            regards, tom lane