After further reflection I was unconvinced that the existing coding is
guaranteed to return valid union datums in every code path for multi-column
indexes. Fix that by forcing a gistunionsubkey() call at the end of the
recursion. Having done that, we can remove some clearly-redundant calls
elsewhere. This should be a little faster for multi-column indexes (since
the previous coding would uselessly do such a call for each column while
unwinding the recursion), as well as much harder to break.
Also, simplify the handling of cases where one side or the other of a
primary split contains only don't-care tuples. The previous coding used a
very ugly hack in removeDontCares() that essentially forced one random
tuple to be treated as non-don't-care, providing a random initial choice of
seed datum for the secondary split. It seems unlikely that that method
will give better-than-random splits. Instead, treat such a split as
degenerate and just let the next column determine the split, the same way
that we handle fully degenerate cases where the two sides produce identical
union datums.
This LOG message was put in over five years ago with the evident
expectation that we'd make all GiST opclasses support secondary split
directly. However, no such thing ever happened, and indeed the number of
opclasses supporting it decreased to zero in 9.2. The reason is that
improving on the default implementation isn't that easy --- the
opclass-specific code that did exist, before 9.2, doesn't appear to have
been any improvement over the default.
Hence, remove the message altogether. There's certainly no point in
nagging users about this in released branches, but I doubt that we'll
ever implement complete opclass-specific support anyway.
Improve comments, rename some variables and functions, slightly simplify
a couple of APIs, in an attempt to make this code readable by people other
than its original author.
Even though this is essentially just cosmetic, back-patch to all active
branches, because otherwise it's going to make back-patching future fixes
in this file very painful.
When considering a non-last column in a multi-column GiST index,
gistsplit.c tries to improve on the split chosen by the opclass-specific
pickSplit function by considering penalties for the next column. However,
there were two bugs in this code: it failed to recompute the union keys for
the leftmost index columns, even though these might well change after
reassigning tuples; and it included the old union keys in the recomputation
for the columns it did recompute, so that those keys couldn't get smaller
even if they should. The first problem could result in an invalid index
in which searches wouldn't find index entries that are in fact present;
the second would make the index less efficient to search.
Both of these errors were caused by misuse of gistMakeUnionItVec, whose
API was designed in a way that just begged such errors to be made. There
is no situation in which it's safe or useful to compute the union keys for
a subset of the index columns, and there is no caller that wants any
previous union keys to be included in the computation; so the undocumented
choice to treat the union keys as in/out rather than pure output parameters
is a waste of code as well as being dangerous.
Hence, rather than just making a minimal patch, I've changed the API of
gistMakeUnionItVec to remove the "startkey" parameter (it now always
processes all index columns) and treat the attr/isnull arrays as purely
output parameters.
In passing, also get rid of a couple of unnecessary and dangerous uses
of static variables in gistutil.c. It's remarkable that the one in
gistMakeUnionKey hasn't given us portability troubles before now, because
in addition to posing a re-entrancy hazard, it was unsafely assuming that
a static char[] array would have at least Datum alignment.
Per investigation of a trouble report from Tomas Vondra. (There are also
some bugs in contrib/btree_gist to be fixed, but that seems like material
for a separate patch.) Back-patch to all supported branches.
corresponding struct definitions. This allows other headers to avoid including
certain highly-loaded headers such as rel.h and relscan.h, instead using just
relcache.h, heapam.h or genam.h, which are more lightweight and thus cause less
unnecessary dependencies.
