Evaluate what to do with function side-effects

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
backend, database

Research direction

The issue concerns mapping functions in the query tree and the risks of removing or duplicating calls during optimization. No files, tests, or entry points are named, so begin by locating query translation and optimization handling for mapping functions. Done requires an agreed policy for side effects and the corresponding behavior to be specified and validated.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area-query breaking-change needs-design

We allow mapping functions (both by providers and by users), and treat these like any other expression node in the query tree. However, functions are unique among SQL nodes in that they can have side-effects, so either removing them (because of an optimization) or duplicating them (e.g. to add a null check) could lead to data corruption.

One possibility here is to assume functions are pure (no side effects), but allow users to tell us that they are non-pure. In that case, we'd avoid optimizing the call away, and throw in cases where duplicating it would be necessary to translate correctly.

Note: regardless of functions and side effects, it seems to be we should be very wary of duplicating subtrees of unknown depth/contents in the query (because of the perf impact).

Dominant language
C#
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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