When considering Incremental Sort below a Gather Merge, we need to be
a bit more careful when matching pathkeys to EC members. It's not enough
to find a member whose Vars are all in the current relation's target;
volatile expressions in particular need to be contained in the target,
otherwise it's too early to use the pathkey.
Reported-by: Jaime Casanova
Author: James Coleman
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra
Backpatch-through: 13, where the incremental sort code was added
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJGNTeNaxpXgBVcRhJX%2B2vSbq%2BF2kJqGBcvompmpvXb7pq%2BoFA%40mail.gmail.com
The explain format used by incremental sort was somewhat inconsistent
with other nodes, making it harder to parse and understand. This commit
addresses that by
- adding an extra space to better separate groups of values
- using colons instead of equal signs to separate key/value
- properly capitalizing first letter of a key
- using separate lines for full and pre-sorted groups
These changes were proposed by Justin Pryzby and mostly copy the final
explain format used to report WAL usage.
Author: Justin Pryzby
Reviewed-by: James Coleman
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200419023625.GP26953@telsasoft.com
When estimating the number of pre-sorted groups in cost_incremental_sort
we must not pass Vars with varno 0 to estimate_num_groups, which would
cause failues in find_base_rel. This may happen when sorting output of
set operations, thanks to generate_append_tlist.
Unlike recurse_set_operations we can't easily access the original target
list, so if we find any Vars with varno 0, we fall back to the default
estimate DEFAULT_NUM_DISTINCT.
Reported-by: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200411214639.GK2228%40telsasoft.com
The test never did ANALYZE on the test table, so the plans depended on
various defaults (e.g. number of groups being 200). This worked most of
the time, but with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS the autoanalyze often managed
to build accurate stats, changing the plan.
Fixed by increasing the size of test tables a bit, making the Sort a bit
more expensive than Incremental Sort. The tests were constructed to test
transitions in the Incremental Sort algorithm, and this change does not
break that.
Reviewed-by: James Coleman
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
Commit d2d8a229bc introduced Incremental Sort, but it was considered
only in create_ordered_paths() as an alternative to regular Sort. There
are many other places that require sorted input and might benefit from
considering Incremental Sort too.
This patch modifies a number of those places, but not all. The concern
is that just adding Incremental Sort to any place that already adds
Sort may increase the number of paths considered, negatively affecting
planning time, without any benefit. So we've taken a more conservative
approach, based on analysis of which places do affect a set of queries
that did seem practical. This means some less common queries may not
benefit from Incremental Sort yet.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: James Coleman
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
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
Tomas Vondra
Peter Eisentraut