Re: Remove WindowClause PARTITION BY items belonging to redundant pathkeys

On Fri, 9 Jun 2023 at 20:57, Richard Guo <guofenglinux@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 9, 2023 at 8:13 AM David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It might be possible to make adjustments in nodeWindowAgg.c to have
>> the equality checks come out as true when there is no ORDER BY.
>> update_frameheadpos() is one location that would need to be adjusted.
>> It would need further study to ensure we don't accidentally break
>> anything. I've not done that study, so won't be adjusting the patch
>> for now.
>
> I'm also not sure if doing that is safe in all cases.  Hmm, do you think
> we can instead check wc->frameOptions to see if it is the RANGE OFFSET
> case in make_pathkeys_for_window(), and decide to not remove or remove
> redundant ORDER BY items according to whether it is or not RANGE OFFSET?

I think ideally, we'd not have to add special cases to the planner to
disable the optimisation for certain cases. I'd much rather see
adjustments in the executor to handle cases where we've removed ORDER
BY columns (e.g adjust update_frameheadpos() to assume rows are equal
when there are no order by columns.)  That of course would require
that there are no cases where removing ORDER BY columns would change
the actual query results.  I can't currently think of any reason why
the results would change, but I'm not overly familiar with the RANGE
option, so I'd need to spend a bit longer looking at it than I have
done so far to feel confident in making the patch process ORDER BY
columns too.

I'm ok with just doing the PARTITION BY stuff as step one.  The ORDER
BY stuff is more complex and risky which seems like a good reason to
tackle separately.