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This patch introduces the ability for complex datatypes to have an in-memory representation that is different from their on-disk format. On-disk formats are typically optimized for minimal size, and in any case they can't contain pointers, so they are often not well-suited for computation. Now a datatype can invent an "expanded" in-memory format that is better suited for its operations, and then pass that around among the C functions that operate on the datatype. There are also provisions (rudimentary as yet) to allow an expanded object to be modified in-place under suitable conditions, so that operations like assignment to an element of an array need not involve copying the entire array. The initial application for this feature is arrays, but it is not hard to foresee using it for other container types like JSON, XML and hstore. I have hopes that it will be useful to PostGIS as well. In this initial implementation, a few heuristics have been hard-wired into plpgsql to improve performance for arrays that are stored in plpgsql variables. We would like to generalize those hacks so that other datatypes can obtain similar improvements, but figuring out some appropriate APIs is left as a task for future work. (The heuristics themselves are probably not optimal yet, either, as they sometimes force expansion of arrays that would be better left alone.) Preliminary performance testing shows impressive speed gains for plpgsql functions that do element-by-element access or update of large arrays. There are other cases that get a little slower, as a result of added array format conversions; but we can hope to improve anything that's annoyingly bad. In any case most applications should see a net win. Tom Lane, reviewed by Andres Freund |
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