Store api question: how to ask for RowLocations

[Rick Hillegas]

I need some advice about how to design an api for requesting that the 
Store include RowLocations in the rows that it scans and hands back to 
the language layer.

The immediate problem that I'm working on involves implementing the 
MERGE statement (DERBY-3155). Part of the implementation involves 
cooking up a left join between two tables. I need to get back 
RowLocations for the right table of that join. In a particular problem 
case which I'm examining, the optimizer picks a HashJoin strategy for 
the left join. That turns into a HashLeftOuterJoinResultSet at execution 
time. And that, in turn, involves having the Store create and fill a 
BackingStoreHashTableFromScan.

The BackingStoreHashTableFromScan is created with a scanColumnList (a 
FormatableBitSet) which specifies some actual columns in the row as well 
as a trailing column position which is meant to represent the 
RowLocation. That trailing column position is represented as 1 plus the 
actual row length. BackingStoreHashTableFromScan doesn't know what to 
make of that column position and silently ignores it. So clearly either 
that's the wrong api for asking for RowLocations or 
BackingStoreHashTableFromScan needs to be taught some new tricks.

So the question is this: what's the right way to ask 
BackingStoreHashTableFromScan to build a hash table whose rows contain 
some set of real column positions plus a trailing RowLocation column? I 
may stumble into other situations where I need to ask a scan to put 
RowLocations into the rows it returns. So it would be good to have a 
general pattern here for requesting this special column.

Thanks,
-Rick