Reduce "X = X" to "X IS NOT NULL", if it's easy to do so.
If the operator is a strict btree equality operator, and X isn't volatile,
then the clause must yield true for any non-null value of X, or null if X
is null. At top level of a WHERE clause, we can ignore the distinction
between false and null results, so it's valid to simplify the clause to
"X IS NOT NULL". This is a useful improvement mainly because we'll get
a far better selectivity estimate in most cases.
Because such cases seldom arise in well-written queries, it is unappetizing
to expend a lot of planner cycles looking for them ... but it turns out
that there's a place we can shoehorn this in practically for free, because
equivclass.c already has to detect and reject candidate equivalences of the
form X = X. That doesn't catch every place that it would be valid to
simplify to X IS NOT NULL, but it catches the typical case. Working harder
doesn't seem justified.
projects / postgresql / commit