Tom Lane wrote:
Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Can we forcibly discard it if *any* messages are received that might
invalidate a plan? So basically it would work fine unless anyone in the system
does any DDL at all? I guess that has the downside of introducing random
unpredictable failures.
Ugh :-(
Or stash the query string and replan it (possibly in the query cache this
time) if someone executes it a second time?
I think that's either my plan A or C.
The main problem with uncontrolled replanning is that there's no way to
detect a change in the query properties. For example suppose the query
is "SELECT * FROM foo" and we've already told the client (via Describe
Statement) that that returns two integer columns. If an inval now
arrives because of "ALTER TABLE foo ADD COLUMN" (or perhaps worse, ALTER
COLUMN TYPE), we've got a problem. If we just blindly replan then we'll
return tuples that do not match the previously given row description,
which will certainly break most clients.
It will always be a good question what user expects as a result of
'SELECT * FROM...'. For example, client may use ODBC or some other
interface for DB communication. One the first step he retrieves
information about the table and it's datatypes, on the second tries to
fetch rows (using interface functions). Client application won't even
guess that table could be changed between these two steps. It's
impossible to avoid such situations, because we can't know how the user
retrieves information about results he will expect.
The plan caching module has enough infrastructure to detect and complain
about these sorts of situations, and it also knows how to manage lock
acquisition so that once we've decided a plan is still good, the tables
won't change underneath us while we use the plan. I don't see any way
to make comparable guarantees without the overhead that goes with the
cache manager.
It's a required overhead. Result should be valid on the execution time,
not on prepare. Cache manager is the best for this.
regards, tom lane
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