Revise TupleTableSlot code to avoid unnecessary construction and disassembly

of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes.  A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays.  Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again.  This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.)  A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.

I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '.  This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr.  While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c b/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c
index 00365cc3d48..90ffbe828a7 100644
--- a/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c
+++ b/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
  *
  *
  * IDENTIFICATION
- *	  $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c,v 1.107 2004/12/31 21:59:38 pgsql Exp $
+ *	  $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/backend/catalog/indexing.c,v 1.108 2005/03/16 21:38:04 tgl Exp $
  *
  *-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  */
@@ -73,19 +73,24 @@ CatalogIndexInsert(CatalogIndexState indstate, HeapTuple heapTuple)
 	int			numIndexes;
 	RelationPtr relationDescs;
 	Relation	heapRelation;
-	TupleDesc	heapDescriptor;
+	TupleTableSlot *slot;
 	IndexInfo **indexInfoArray;
 	Datum		datum[INDEX_MAX_KEYS];
 	char		nullv[INDEX_MAX_KEYS];
 
 	/*
-	 * Get information from the state structure.
+	 * Get information from the state structure.  Fall out if nothing to do.
 	 */
 	numIndexes = indstate->ri_NumIndices;
+	if (numIndexes == 0)
+		return;
 	relationDescs = indstate->ri_IndexRelationDescs;
 	indexInfoArray = indstate->ri_IndexRelationInfo;
 	heapRelation = indstate->ri_RelationDesc;
-	heapDescriptor = RelationGetDescr(heapRelation);
+
+	/* Need a slot to hold the tuple being examined */
+	slot = MakeSingleTupleTableSlot(RelationGetDescr(heapRelation));
+	ExecStoreTuple(heapTuple, slot, InvalidBuffer, false);
 
 	/*
 	 * for each index, form and insert the index tuple
@@ -106,11 +111,10 @@ CatalogIndexInsert(CatalogIndexState indstate, HeapTuple heapTuple)
 
 		/*
 		 * FormIndexDatum fills in its datum and null parameters with
-		 * attribute information taken from the given heap tuple.
+		 * attribute information taken from the given tuple.
 		 */
 		FormIndexDatum(indexInfo,
-					   heapTuple,
-					   heapDescriptor,
+					   slot,
 					   NULL,	/* no expression eval to do */
 					   datum,
 					   nullv);
@@ -128,6 +132,8 @@ CatalogIndexInsert(CatalogIndexState indstate, HeapTuple heapTuple)
 		if (result)
 			pfree(result);
 	}
+
+	ExecDropSingleTupleTableSlot(slot);
 }
 
 /*