Incremental Sort is an optimized variant of multikey sort for cases when
the input is already sorted by a prefix of the requested sort keys. For
example when the relation is already sorted by (key1, key2) and we need
to sort it by (key1, key2, key3) we can simply split the input rows into
groups having equal values in (key1, key2), and only sort/compare the
remaining column key3.
This has a number of benefits:
- Reduced memory consumption, because only a single group (determined by
values in the sorted prefix) needs to be kept in memory. This may also
eliminate the need to spill to disk.
- Lower startup cost, because Incremental Sort produce results after each
prefix group, which is beneficial for plans where startup cost matters
(like for example queries with LIMIT clause).
We consider both Sort and Incremental Sort, and decide based on costing.
The implemented algorithm operates in two different modes:
- Fetching a minimum number of tuples without check of equality on the
prefix keys, and sorting on all columns when safe.
- Fetching all tuples for a single prefix group and then sorting by
comparing only the remaining (non-prefix) keys.
We always start in the first mode, and employ a heuristic to switch into
the second mode if we believe it's beneficial - the goal is to minimize
the number of unnecessary comparions while keeping memory consumption
below work_mem.
This is a very old patch series. The idea was originally proposed by
Alexander Korotkov back in 2013, and then revived in 2017. In 2018 the
patch was taken over by James Coleman, who wrote and rewrote most of the
current code.
There were many reviewers/contributors since 2013 - I've done my best to
pick the most active ones, and listed them in this commit message.
Author: James Coleman, Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra, Andreas Karlsson, Marti Raudsepp, Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas, Thomas Munro, Antonin Houska, Andres Freund, Alexander Kuzmenkov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdscOX5an71nHd8WSUH6GNOCf=V7wgDaTXdDd9=goN-gfA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
This replaces the old, recursive tree-walk based evaluation, with
non-recursive, opcode dispatch based, expression evaluation.
Projection is now implemented as part of expression evaluation.
This both leads to significant performance improvements, and makes
future just-in-time compilation of expressions easier.
The speed gains primarily come from:
- non-recursive implementation reduces stack usage / overhead
- simple sub-expressions are implemented with a single jump, without
function calls
- sharing some state between different sub-expressions
- reduced amount of indirect/hard to predict memory accesses by laying
out operation metadata sequentially; including the avoidance of
nearly all of the previously used linked lists
- more code has been moved to expression initialization, avoiding
constant re-checks at evaluation time
Future just-in-time compilation (JIT) has become easier, as
demonstrated by released patches intended to be merged in a later
release, for primarily two reasons: Firstly, due to a stricter split
between expression initialization and evaluation, less code has to be
handled by the JIT. Secondly, due to the non-recursive nature of the
generated "instructions", less performance-critical code-paths can
easily be shared between interpreted and compiled evaluation.
The new framework allows for significant future optimizations. E.g.:
- basic infrastructure for to later reduce the per executor-startup
overhead of expression evaluation, by caching state in prepared
statements. That'd be helpful in OLTPish scenarios where
initialization overhead is measurable.
- optimizing the generated "code". A number of proposals for potential
work has already been made.
- optimizing the interpreter. Similarly a number of proposals have
been made here too.
The move of logic into the expression initialization step leads to some
backward-incompatible changes:
- Function permission checks are now done during expression
initialization, whereas previously they were done during
execution. In edge cases this can lead to errors being raised that
previously wouldn't have been, e.g. a NULL array being coerced to a
different array type previously didn't perform checks.
- The set of domain constraints to be checked, is now evaluated once
during expression initialization, previously it was re-built
every time a domain check was evaluated. For normal queries this
doesn't change much, but e.g. for plpgsql functions, which caches
ExprStates, the old set could stick around longer. The behavior
around might still change.
Author: Andres Freund, with significant changes by Tom Lane,
changes by Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20161206034955.bh33paeralxbtluv@alap3.anarazel.de
friends). This code has all been ifdef'd out for many years, and doesn't
seem to have any prospect of becoming any more useful in the future.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE is what people use in practice, and I think if we did want
process-wide counters we'd be more likely to put in dtrace events for that
than try to resurrect this code. Get rid of it so as to have one less detail
to worry about while refactoring execMain.c.
any use in the past many years, we'd have made some effort to include
them in all executor node types; but in fact they were only in
nodeAppend.c and nodeIndexscan.c, up until I copied nodeIndexscan.c's
occurrence into the new bitmap node types. Remove some other unused
macros in execdebug.h, too. Some day the whole header probably ought to
go away in favor of better-designed facilities.
When one side of the join has a NULL, we don't want to uselessly try
to match it against every remaining tuple of the other side. While
at it, rewrite the comparison machinery to avoid multiple evaluations
of the left and right input expressions and to use a btree comparator
where available, instead of double operator calls. Also revise the
state machine to eliminate redundant comparisons and hopefully make it
more readable too.
of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
Bruce Momjian