Re: [PoC] Reducing planning time when tables have many partitions

On Sat, 5 Apr 2025 at 16:55, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am still thinking about the duplicate members being returned from
> the iterator for child join rels due to them being duplicated into
> each component relid element in ec_childmembers. I did consider if
> these could just not be duplicated and instead just put into the
> ec_childmember element according to their lowest component relid. For
> that to work, all callers that need these would need to ensure they
> never pass some subset of child_relids when setting up the
> EquivalenceMemberIterator. I need to study a bit more to understand if
> that's doable.

It looks like the child members added by
add_child_join_rel_equivalences() are only required for pathkey
requirements.  The EquivalenceMember mentions:

 * for an appendrel child.  These members are used for determining the
 * pathkeys of scans on the child relation and for explicitly sorting the
 * child when necessary to build a MergeAppend path for the whole appendrel
 * tree.  An em_is_child member has no impact on the properties of the EC as a

I used the attached .txt file to highlight the places where the
iterator returned the same member twice and saw only that
find_ec_member_matching_expr() does this.

Because during createplan, we'll have the specific RelOptInfo that we
need the EquivalenceMember for, we'll be passing the "relids" of that
RelOptInfo to setup_eclass_member_iterator(), in which case, I think
it's fine to store the member in just one of the ec_childmembers[]
array slots for just one of the relids making up the
RELOPT_OTHER_JOINREL's component relids as that means it'll be found
once only due to how eclass_member_iterator_next() looks at all of the
ec_childmembers[] elements for the given relids.

Doing this also allows the code in add_child_eq_member() to be simplified.

I made this happen in the attached v41 patch, and that's the last
outstanding issue that I had for this.

I think this is worthy of getting into v18. Does anyone else think
differently? It'd be good to know that soon.

David