pgsql: Use Limit instead of Unique to implement DISTINCT, when possible

Use Limit instead of Unique to implement DISTINCT, when possible

When all of the query's DISTINCT pathkeys have been marked as redundant
due to EquivalenceClasses existing which contain constants, we can just
implement the DISTINCT operation on a query by just limiting the number of
returned rows to 1 instead of performing a Unique on all of the matching
(duplicate) rows.

This applies in cases such as:

SELECT DISTINCT col,col2 FROM tab WHERE col = 1 AND col2 = 10;

If there are any matching rows, then they must all be {1,10}.  There's no
point in fetching all of those and running a Unique operator on them to
leave only a single row.  Here we effectively just find the first row and
then stop.  We are obviously unable to apply this optimization if either
the col = 1 or col2 = 10 were missing from the WHERE clause or if there
were any additional columns in the SELECT clause.

Such queries are probably not all that common, but detecting when we can
apply this optimization amounts to checking if the distinct_pathkeys are
NULL, which is very cheap indeed.

Nothing is done here to check if the query already has a LIMIT clause.  If
it does then the plan may end up with 2 Limits nodes.  There's no harm in
that and it's probably not worth the complexity to unify them into a
single Limit node.

Author: David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Richard Guo
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvqS0j8RUWRUSgCAXxOqnYjHUXmKwspRj4GzVfOO25ByHA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/MEYPR01MB7101CD5DA0A07C9DE2B74850A4239@MEYPR01MB7101.ausprd01.prod.outlook.com

Branch
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master

Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/5543677ec90a15c73dab5ed4f0902b3b920f0b87

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/optimizer/plan/planner.c             | 77 ++++++++++++++++++++----
src/test/regress/expected/select_distinct.out    | 54 +++++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/expected/select_distinct_on.out | 50 +++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/sql/select_distinct.sql         | 26 ++++++++
src/test/regress/sql/select_distinct_on.sql      | 25 ++++++++
5 files changed, 221 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)