Re: gaussian distribution pgbench - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Heikki Linnakangas
Subject Re: gaussian distribution pgbench
Date
Msg-id 5326BA1F.5080609@vmware.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: gaussian distribution pgbench  (KONDO Mitsumasa <kondo.mitsumasa@lab.ntt.co.jp>)
Responses Re: gaussian distribution pgbench  (KONDO Mitsumasa <kondo.mitsumasa@lab.ntt.co.jp>)
List pgsql-hackers
On 03/17/2014 10:40 AM, KONDO Mitsumasa wrote:
> By the way, you seem to want to remove --gaussian=NUM and --exponential=NUM
> command options. Can you tell me the objective reason? I think pgbench is the
> benchmark test on PostgreSQL and default benchmark is TPC-B-like benchmark.
> It is written in documents, and default benchmark wasn't changed by my patch.
> So we need not remove command options, and they are one of the variety of
> benchmark options. Maybe you have something misunderstanding about my patch...

There is an infinite number of variants of the TPC-B test that we could 
include in pgbench. If we start adding every one of them, we're quickly 
going to have hundreds of options to choose the workload. I'd like to 
keep pgbench simple. These two new test variants, gaussian and 
exponential, are not that special that they'd deserve to be included in 
the program itself.

pgbench already has a mechanism for running custom scripts, in which you 
can specify whatever workload you want. Let's use that. If it's missing 
something you need to specify the workload you want, let's enhance the 
script language.

The features we're missing, which makes it difficult to write the 
gaussian and exponential variants as custom scripts, is the capability 
to create random numbers with a non-uniform distribution. That's the 
feature we should include in pgbench.

(Actually, you could do the Box-Muller transformation as part of the 
query, to convert the uniform random variable to a gaussian one. Then 
you wouldn't need any changes to pgbench. But I agree that "\setrandom 
... gaussian" would be quite handy)

- Heikki



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