Re: Should consider materializing the cheapest inner path in consider_parallel_nestloop()

Hello Richard,

18.07.2024 17:30, Richard Guo wrote:
> The problemed plan is a non-parallel nestloop join.  It's just chance
> which join order the planner will pick, and slight variations in
> underlying statistics could result in a different displayed plan.
>  From the two verbose plans, we can see slight variations in the
> statistics for the parallel seqscan of tenk1.
>
> ->  Parallel Seq Scan on public.tenk1 t1  (cost=0.00..370.00 rows=2500
> width=244)
>
> VS.
>
> ->  Parallel Seq Scan on public.tenk1 t1  (cost=0.00..369.99 rows=2499
> width=244)
>
> I have no idea why the underlying statistics changed, but it seems
> that this slight change is sufficent to result in a different plan.

I think it could be caused by the same reason as [1] and I really can
easily (without multiple instances/loops. just with `make check`) reproduce
the failure with cranky-ConditionalLockBufferForCleanup.patch (but
targeted for "VACUUM ANALYZE tenk1;").

> According to the discussion in [1], I think what we wanted to test
> with this query is that parallel nestloop join is not generated if the
> inner path is not parallel-safe.  Therefore, I modified this test case
> to use a lateral join, rendering the inner path not parallel-safe
> while also enforcing the join order.  Please see attached.

The modified test survives my testing procedure. Thank you for the patch!

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/66eb9a6e-fc67-a230-c5b1-2a741e8b88c6%40gmail.com

Best regards,
Alexander