Re: [PERFORM] Optimization inner join - Mailing list pgsql-performance

Hello,

Hi Phillip.

Not sure if it is all that common. Curious what if you put b.b IS NOT NULL in the WHERE statement?

It's the question. In the company I work with, one of my clients asked me: "Why PostgreSQL does not remove rows with null in column b (table b), before joining, since these rows have no corresponding in table a?" I gave the suggestion to put the IS NOT NULL in the WHERE statement, but HE can't modify the query in the application.

I did the tests with Oracle and it uses a predicate in the query plan, removing the lines where b.b is null. In Oracle, it´s the same plan, with and without IS NOT NULL in the WHERE statement.

Being the client in question, I would like to make a little remark: What we thought could be optimized here at first is on the row estimate of the index scan; which could take null_frac into account. To put things into perspective, our similar case in production has a table with 6 million lines where only 9.5k aren´t null for the join field, an the over-estimation is throwing away good plans (like ~150ms execution time) in favor of pretty bad ones (~80s execution time).

We´ve asked application people to put the where not null workaround, which works great, and are waiting on an answer, but I believe getting better estimates without that would be great if possible.

On 19/01/2017 09:34, Phillip Couto wrote:

NULL is still a value that may be paired with a NULL in a.a

Is that so? I would believe you would never get a match, as NULL <> NULL

On Jan 19, 2017, at 05:08, Clailson <clailson.dba@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Is there something in the roadmap to optimize the inner join?

I've this situation above. Table b has 400 rows with null in the column b.

explain analyze select * from a inner join b on (b.b = a.a);

"Merge Join  (cost=0.55..65.30 rows=599 width=16) (actual time=0.030..1.173 rows=599 loops=1)" 
"  Merge Cond: (a.a = b.b)" 
"  ->  Index Scan using a_pkey on a  (cost=0.28..35.27 rows=1000 width=8) (actual time=0.014..0.364 rows=1000 loops=1)" 
"  ->  Index Scan using in01 on b  (cost=0.28..33.27 rows=1000 width=8) (actual time=0.012..0.249 rows=600 loops=1)" 
"Total runtime: 1.248 ms" 

My question is: Why the planner isn't removing the null rows during the scan of table b?

-- 
Clailson Soares Dinízio de Almeida

Regards,

Gustavo R. Montesino
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