On 12/3/21 12:05, Hywel Carver wrote:
I've built and tested this, and it seems to function correctly to me. One question I have is 
whether the added "IS NOT NULL" filters can be omitted when they're unnecessary. Some of 
the resulting plans included an "IS NOT NULL" filter on a non-nullable column. To be 
clear, this is still an improvement (to me) without that.
I think, here we could ask more general question: do we want to remove a 'IS NOT NULL' clause from the clause list if the rest of the list implicitly implies it?

Right now we don't analyze list of clauses at all:
CREATE TABLE a (x int);

EXPLAIN (COSTS OFF) SELECT * FROM a WHERE (x < 1) AND (X IS NOT NULL) AND
  (x < 1) AND (X IS NOT NULL);
                               QUERY PLAN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on a
   Filter: ((x IS NOT NULL) AND (x IS NOT NULL) AND (x < 1) AND (x < 1))

And even worse:
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, VERBOSE) SELECT * FROM a WHERE (X IS NOT NULL) AND (X IS NULL); QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seq Scan on public.a (cost=0.00..15.00 rows=87 width=4) (actual time=0.136..0.136 rows=0 loops=1)
   Output: x
   Filter: ((a.x IS NOT NULL) AND (a.x IS NULL))
   Rows Removed by Filter: 1000

It could reduce a number of selectivity mistakes, but increase CPU consumption. If we had such a clause analyzing machinery, we could trivially remove this unneeded qual.

--
regards,
Andrey Lepikhov
Postgres Professional


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