Re: Failed assertion clauses != NIL

On Sun, 24 Nov 2019 at 23:40, Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Attached are two patched, related to this bug report.
>
>
> 0001 - Fix choose_best_statistics to check clauses individually
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This modifies the choose_best_statistics function to properly check
> which clauses are actually covered by each statistic object, and only
> use attnums from those.
>
> The patch ended up pretty small, because we already have all the
> necessary info (per-clause attnums) precalculated. Which means this
> should not be much more expensive than before.
>
> The main drawback is that this does change signature of a function
> defined in statistics.h - we have to pass more info (per-clause bitmaps
> and info which clauses are already estimated). Which means ABI break.
>
> I'm not sure how likely it is that external code is calling this
> function, but the probability is non-zero. So maybe even if the patch is
> fairly small, in backbranches we should use the simple fix with just
> returning if the list is NIL.
>

On a quick read-through that algorithm makes a lot more sense. It
seems pretty unlikely that anyone would be using
choose_best_statistics() anywhere else, so I think maybe it's fine to
change that in back-branches.

A couple of comments:

1). I think you should pass estimatedClauses to
choose_best_statistics() as a pure input parameter (i.e., remove one
"*"), since it doesn't (and must not) modify that set. In fact, on
closer inspection, I don't think you need to pass it to
choose_best_statistics() at all, since its callers already check
clauses against estimatedClauses. Therefore, in
choose_best_statistics(), incompatible and already-estimated clauses
both appear the same (as NULL/empty attribute sets), and therefore the
estimatedClauses check will never be tripped.

2). The new parameter "clauses" should probably be called something
like "clause_attnums" or some such, to better reflect what it actually
is. And it should be documented that NULL values represent
incompatible/already-estimated clauses.

3). In statext_mcv_clauselist_selectivity(), the check for at least 2
attributes is no longer needed, because choose_best_statistics() now
does that, so there's also no need to compute clauses_attnums there.

Regards,
Dean