Re: Another multi-row VALUES bug

On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 at 18:56, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> I wonder if somehow we could just make one pass over
> all the VALUES RTEs, and process each one as needed?  The problem
> is to identify the relevant target relation, I guess.
>

I have been thinking about that some more, but I think it would be
pretty difficult to achieve.

Part of the problem is that the targetlist processing and VALUES RTE
processing are quite closely coupled (because of things like GENERATED
ALWAYS columns). Both rewriteTargetListIU() and rewriteValuesRTE()
rely on being passed the VALUES RTE that the targetlist is reading
from, and rewriteValuesRTE() then relies on extra information returned
by rewriteTargetListIU().

Also, there's the way that DEFAULTs from updatable views work, which
means that the DEFAULTs in a VALUES RTE won't necessarily all come
from the same target relation.

So I think it would be much harder to do the VALUES RTE processing
anywhere other than where it's being done right now, and even if it
could be done elsewhere, it would be a very invasive change, and
therefore hard to back-patch.

That, of course, leaves the problem of identifying the right VALUES
RTE to process.

A different way to do this, without relying on the contents of the
targetlist, is to note that, while processing a product query, what we
really want to do is ignore any VALUES RTEs from the original query,
since they will have already been processed. There should then never
be more than one VALUES RTE left to process -- the one from the rule
action.

This can be done by exploiting the fact that in product queries, the
rtable always consists of the rtable from the original query followed
by the rtable from the rule action, so we just need to ignore the
right number of RTEs at the start of the rtable. Of course that would
break if we ever changed the way rewriteRuleAction() worked, but at
least it only depends on that one other place in the code, which has
been stable for a long time, so the risk of future breakage seems
managable.

Regards,
Dean