Re: Postgres using nested loops despite setting enable_nestloop to false

Hello Tom, thanks for your help!

I understand that the "time" table cross join needs a nested loop. Indeed that nested loop is present in all plans generated.

But it is the _second_ (topmost) nested loop that is the issue. Once the time table has been joined it should be possible to do something else for that second nested loop. This is proven by that query on 9.6 (which has only one nested loop for that exact same query, on almost the same database content as the Postgresql 13 one). Even on Postgresql 13 a correct plan is made in another database (exact same structure, different data); I have attached the plan that is made there too.

All databases that make a plan without the second nested loops also finish the query within a reasonable time period (16 seconds on the .9.6 server). On the 13 server with the nested loops plan the process times out after 2 hours.

As far as the row counts go: yes, this database is not by far the biggest one, so the row counts are less. It also depends on what query we actually run (we can have hundreds of them on different tables, and not all tables are that big).

I disabled nested_loops not just for fun, I disabled it because without it many of the queries effectively hang because their plan estimate expects only a few rows while in reality there are millions. Disabling nested loops will let lots of the generated queries fail, even on smaller datasets.

I have no idea of how to get rid of those inequality queries, except by not using SQL and doing them by hand in code.. That would prove to be disastrous for performance as I'd have to read all those datasets completely... Do you have an idea on how to do that better?

Regards,

Frits

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 5:21 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Frits Jalvingh <jal@etc.to> writes:
> I have attached both plans, both made with set enable_nestloop = false in
> the attachments.

The reason why you're getting a nested loop is that the planner has no
other choice.  The "tijd" table has no join conditions that would be
amenable to hash- or merge-joining it to something else, because both
of those join methods require a plain equality join condition.  AFAICS
in a quick look, all of tijd's join conditions look more like

    Join Filter: ((di04238cluster.dv_start_dts <= tijd.einddatum) AND (di04238cluster.dv_end_dts > tijd.einddatum))

which is not amenable to anything except brute force cross-join-and-
test-the-condition.

Given that, it's likely that "enable_nestloop = false" is making things
worse not better, by artificially distorting the plan shape.

Seeing the large number of joins involved, I wonder what your
geqo_threshold, join_collapse_limit, and from_collapse_limit settings
are, and whether you can get a better plan by increasing them.

The planner doesn't seem to think that any of these joins involve
a very large number of rows, so I doubt that your work_mem setting
is very relevant.  However, are these rowcount estimates accurate?
You claimed upthread that you were dealing with hundreds of millions
of rows, but it's impossible to credit that cost estimates like

  ->  Seq Scan on s_h_cluster_ssm di01905cluster  (cost=0.00..155.05 rows=1072 width=24)
        Filter: (soort = 'FIN'::text)

correspond to scanning large tables.

In the end, I fear that finding a way to get rid of those
inequality join conditions may be your only real answer.

                        regards, tom lane