Re: Eager aggregation, take 3

[Richard Guo]

On Sun, Jul 7, 2024 at 10:45 AM Paul George <p.a.georg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for reviving this patch and for all of your work on it! Eager 
> aggregation pushdown will be beneficial for my work and I'm hoping to see it 
> land.

Thanks for looking at this patch!

> The output of both the original query and this one match (and the plans with 
> eager aggregation and the subquery are nearly identical if you restore the 
> LEFT JOIN to a JOIN). I admittedly may be missing a subtlety, but does this 
> mean that there are conditions under which eager aggregation can be pushed 
> down to the nullable side?

I think it's a very risky thing to push a partial aggregation down to
the nullable side of an outer join, because the NULL-extended rows
produced by the outer join would not be available when we perform the
partial aggregation, while with a non-eager-aggregation plan these
rows are available for the top-level aggregation.  This may put the
rows into groups in a different way than expected, or get wrong values
from the aggregate functions.  I've managed to compose an example:

create table t (a int, b int);
insert into t select 1, 1;

select t2.a, count(*) from t t1 left join t t2 on t2.b > 1 group by
t2.a having t2.a is null;
 a | count
---+-------
   |     1
(1 row)

This is the expected result, because after the outer join we have got
a NULL-extended row.

But if we somehow push down the partial aggregation to the nullable
side of this outer join, we would get a wrong result.

explain (costs off)
select t2.a, count(*) from t t1 left join t t2 on t2.b > 1 group by
t2.a having t2.a is null;
                QUERY PLAN
-------------------------------------------
 Finalize HashAggregate
   Group Key: t2.a
   ->  Nested Loop Left Join
         Filter: (t2.a IS NULL)
         ->  Seq Scan on t t1
         ->  Materialize
               ->  Partial HashAggregate
                     Group Key: t2.a
                     ->  Seq Scan on t t2
                           Filter: (b > 1)
(10 rows)

select t2.a, count(*) from t t1 left join t t2 on t2.b > 1 group by
t2.a having t2.a is null;
 a | count
---+-------
   |     0
(1 row)

I believe there are cases where pushing a partial aggregation down to
the nullable side of an outer join can be safe, but I doubt that there
is an easy way to identify these cases and do the push-down for them.
So for now I think we'd better refrain from doing that.

Thanks
Richard