[EPIC] A collection of items to improve CASE performance

[alamb]

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

@pepijnve and @chenkovsky has been working on a series of improvements to improve the performance of evaluating CASE expressions performance that I think should be highlighted / made more visible, so I am making a ticket to collect the work

TLDR

SELECT CASE WHEN ... ELSE ... END ...

Will go faster 🚀

Items

• Improve performance of queries of the form SELECT *, CASE ... END #18056
• Implement lazy evaluation for nvl #17982
• fix: lazy evaluation for coalesce #17357
• Short circuit complex case evaluation modes as soon as possible #17898
• #17972 Restore case expr/expr optimisation while ensuring lazy evaluation #17973
• Regression: sql_planner benchmark panic'ing on main #17801
• Implement lazy evaluation for nvl2 #17983
• #17982 Make nvl a thin wrapper for coalesce #17991