On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:19:53PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 6:58 PM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 12789 28.2686 libc-2.13.so strcoll_l
> >> 6802 15.0350 postgres text_cmp
> >
> > I'm still curious how it would compare to call strxfrm and sort the
> > resulting binary blobs. I don't think the sortsupport stuff actually
> > makes this any easier though. Since using it requires storing the
> > binary blob somewhere I think the support would have to be baked into
> > tuplesort (or hacked into the sortkey as an expr that was evaluated
> > earlier somehow).
>
> Well, the real problem here is that the strxfrm'd representations
> aren't just bigger - they are huge. On MacBook Pro, if the input
> representation is n characters, the strxfrm'd representation is 9x+3
> characters.
Ouch. I was holding out hope that you could get a meaningful
improvement if we could use the first X bytes of the strxfrm output so
you only need to do a strcoll on strings that actually nearly match.
But with an information density of 9 bytes for one 1 character it
doesn't seem worthwhile.
That and this gem in the strxfrm manpage:
RETURN VALUE The strxfrm() function returns the number of bytes required to store the transformed string in
destexcluding the terminating '\0' character. If the value returned is n or more, the contents of dest are
indeterminate.
Which means that you have to take the entire transformed string, you
can't just ask for the first bit. I think that kind of leaves the whole
idea dead in the water.
Just for interest I looked at the ICU API for this and they have the
same restriction. There is another function which you can use to
return partial sort keys (ucol_nextSortKeyPart) but it produces
"uncompressed sortkeys", which it seems is what Mac OSX is doing, which
seems useless for our purposes. Either this is a hard problem or we're
nowhere near a target use case.
Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does
> not attach much importance to his own thoughts. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
