'SELECT DISTINCT a,b FROM t1' should not use temp table if there is unique
index (or primary key) on a.
There are a number of other similar cases that can be calculated without the
use of a temp table : multi-part unique indexes, primary keys or using GROUP BY
instead of DISTINCT.
When a GROUP BY/DISTINCT clause contains all key parts of a unique
index, then it is guaranteed that the fields of the clause will be
unique, therefore we can optimize away GROUP BY/DISTINCT altogether.
This optimization has two effects:
* there is no need to create a temporary table to compute the
GROUP/DISTINCT operation (or the temporary table will be smaller if only GROUP
is removed and DISTINCT stays or if DISTINCT is removed and GROUP BY stays)
* this causes the statement in effect to become updatable in Connector/Java
because the result set columns will be direct reference to the primary key of
the table (instead to the temporary table that it currently references).
Implemented a check that will optimize away GROUP BY/DISTINCT for queries like
the above.
Currently it will work only for single non-constant table in the FROM clause.
When converting DISTINCT to GROUP BY where the columns are from the covering
index and they are quoted twice in the SELECT list the optimizer is creating
improper processing sequence. This is because of the fact that the columns
of the covering index are not recognized as such and treated as non-index
columns.
Generally speaking duplicate columns can safely be removed from the GROUP
BY/DISTINCT list because this will not add or remove new rows in the
resulting set. Duplicates can be removed even if they are not consecutive
(as is the case for ORDER BY, where the duplicate columns can be removed
only if they are consecutive).
So we can safely transform "SELECT DISTINCT a,a FROM ... ORDER BY a" to
"SELECT a,a FROM ... GROUP BY a ORDER BY a" instead of
"SELECT a,a FROM .. GROUP BY a,a ORDER BY a". We can even transform
"SELECT DISTINCT a,b,a FROM ... ORDER BY a,b" to
"SELECT a,b,a FROM ... GROUP BY a,b ORDER BY a,b".
The fix to this bug consists of checking for duplicate columns in the SELECT
list when constructing the GROUP BY list in transforming DISTINCT to GROUP
BY and skipping the ones that are already in.
Added test cases for bug #12625.
sql_select.cc:
Fixed bug #12625.
Fixed invalid removal of constant items from the DISTINCT
list in the function create_distinct_group.
