per-tuple space overhead for sorts in memory. I chose to replace the
previous patch that tried to write out the bare minimum amount of data
when sorting on disk; instead, just dump the MinimalTuples as-is. This
wastes 3 to 10 bytes per tuple depending on architecture and null-bitmap
length, but the simplification in the writetup/readtup routines seems
worth it.
and transaction visibility fields of tuples being sorted. These are
always uninteresting in a tuple being sorted (if the fields were actually
selected, they'd have been pulled out into user columns beforehand).
This saves about 24 bytes per row being sorted, which is a useful savings
for any but the widest of sort rows. Per recent discussion.
with fixed merge order (fixed number of "tapes") was based on obsolete
assumptions, namely that tape drives are expensive. Since our "tapes"
are really just a couple of buffers, we can have a lot of them given
adequate workspace. This allows reduction of the number of merge passes
with consequent savings of I/O during large sorts.
Simon Riggs with some rework by Tom Lane
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
Make btree index creation and initial validation of foreign-key constraints
use maintenance_work_mem rather than work_mem as their memory limit.
Add some code to guc.c to allow these variables to be referenced by their
old names in SHOW and SET commands, for backwards compatibility.
(vs. at the end of a normal sort). This ensures that explicit sorts
yield the same ordering as a btree index scan. To be really sure that
that equivalence holds, we use the btree entries in pg_amop to decide
whether we are looking at a '<' or '>' operator. For a sort operator
that has no btree association, we put the nulls at the front if the
operator is named '>' ... pretty grotty, but it does the right thing in
simple ASC and DESC cases, and at least there's no possibility of getting
a different answer depending on the plan type chosen.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
a generalized module 'tuplesort.c' that can sort either HeapTuples or
IndexTuples, and is not tied to execution of a Sort node. Clean up
memory leakages in sorting, and replace nbtsort.c's private implementation
of mergesorting with calls to tuplesort.c.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Daemon