a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
maintained for each cache entry. A cache entry will not be freed until
the matching ReleaseSysCache call has been executed. This eliminates
worries about cache entries getting dropped while still in use. See
my posting to pg-hackers of even date for more info.
pointers, namely the catcache tuple fetch routines. Also get rid of
the unused and possibly confusing 'size' field in struct cachedesc.
Since it doesn't allow for variable-length fields, anyone who
actually trusted it would likely be making a mistake...
an attribute of a tuple previously fetched with SearchSysCacheTuple.
This avoids a lot of redundant cache lookups, particularly in selfuncs.c.
Also, remove SearchSysCacheStruct, which was unused and grotty.
Make all system indexes unique.
Make all cache loads use system indexes.
Rename *rel to *relid in inheritance tables.
Rename cache names to be clearer.
no longer returns buffer pointer, can be gotten from scan;
descriptor; bootstrap can create multi-key indexes;
pg_procname index now is multi-key index; oidint2, oidint4, oidname
are gone (must be removed from regression tests); use System Cache
rather than sequential scan in many places; heap_modifytuple no
longer takes buffer parameter; remove unused buffer parameter in
a few other functions; oid8 is not index-able; remove some use of
single-character variable names; cleanup Buffer variables usage
and scan descriptor looping; cleaned up allocation and freeing of
tuples; 18k lines of diff;