Re: Custom Scan APIs (Re: Custom Plan node)

Hanada-san,

Thanks for your reviewing,

2013/12/4 Shigeru Hanada <shigeru(dot)hanada(at)gmail(dot)com>:
> I first reviewed postgres_fdw portion of the patches to learn the
> outline of Custom Plan. Wiki page is also a good textbook of the
> feature. I have some random comments about the basic design of Custom
> Plan:
>
> (1) IIUC add_join_path and add_scan_path are added to allow extensions
> to plug their code into planner.
>
Almost yes. For more correctness, these hooks allows extensions to
plug paths they can provide into a particular join or scan. Then planner
will choose the cheapest one according to the cost value.

> (2) FDW framework has executor callbacks based on existing executor
> nodes. Is there any plan to integrate them into one way, or wrap on
> by another? I'm not sure that we should have two similar framework
> side by side.
> # I'm sorry if I've missed the past discussion about this issue.
>
Probably, FDW has different role from the CustomScan API.
As literal, FDW performs as a bridge between a relation form and
an opaque external data source, to intermediate two different world
on behalf of a foreign table.
On the other hand, CustomScan allows to provide alternative logic
to scan or join particular relations, in addition to the built-in ones,
but does not perform on behalf of foreign tables.

Existing FDW is designed to implement a scan on an intangible
relation, thus it can assume some things; like a tuple returned
from FDW has equivalent TupleDesc as table definition, or it can
always use ExecScan() for all the cases.
So, I don't think these two frameworks should be consolidated
because it makes confusion on the existing extensions that
assumes FDW callbacks always has a particular foreign table
definition.

> (3) Internal routines such as is_self_managed_relation and
> has_wholerow_reference seem to be useful for other FDWs. Is it able
> to move them into core?
>
Probably, src/backend/foreign/foreign.c is a good host for them.

> (4) postgres_fdw estimates costs of join by calculating local numbers.
> How about to support remote estimation by throwing EXPLALAIN query
> when use_remote_estimates = true.
>
I'm uncertain whether the cost value from remote EXPLAIN represents
right difficulty on the local side, because it indeed represents the
difficulty to join two relations on the remote side, however, does not
represents local job; that just fetches tuples from the result set of
remote query with table joining.
How about your opinion? Is the remote cost estimation value comparable
with local value?

Thanks,
--
KaiGai Kohei <kaigai(at)kaigai(dot)gr(dot)jp>