Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

• related to Should PruningPredicate coerce? #14944

The usecase is a predicate like this, where month_id is an integer:

month_id = '202502'

In DataFusion this results in casting the month_id column to a Utf8 and then is compared to the string '202502'

This is non ideal for at least 3 reasons:

1. Converting many rows to strings is expensive
2. Comparing strings is much slower than comparing integers
3. many data sources (like parquet) only handle predicates in the form of <col> <op> <const> and not cast(<col>) <op> <const> so these predicates can be pushed down

Here is an example (note the predicate in the plan below is CAST(foo.month_id AS Utf8) = Utf8("2024") rather than foo.month_id = Int32("2024")):

DataFusion CLI v46.0.0
> create table foo(month_id int) as values (1), (2), (3);
0 row(s) fetched.
Elapsed 0.003 seconds.

> explain select * from foo where month_id = '2024';
+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| plan_type     | plan                                                  |
+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| logical_plan  | Filter: CAST(foo.month_id AS Utf8) = Utf8("2024")     |
|               |   TableScan: foo projection=[month_id]                |
| physical_plan | CoalesceBatchesExec: target_batch_size=8192           |
|               |   FilterExec: CAST(month_id@0 AS Utf8) = 2024         |
|               |     DataSourceExec: partitions=1, partition_sizes=[1] |
|               |                                                       |
+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
2 row(s) fetched.
Elapsed 0.008 seconds.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like the filter in the plan above to be FilterExec: month_id = 2024 (no cast on month_id)

Other notes:

1. I think this applies to = and !=
2. I don't think it can be done for <, <=, >= and > as the semantics for comparing ints and strings is different than equality.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We already have something called unwrap_in_cast that does this transformation

@jayzhan211 has moved this code in this PR

• Move UnwrapCastInComparison into Simplifier #15012

I think once that PR merged, that would be the natural place to add this optimization

Additional context

No response