"Markus Schiltknecht" <markus@bluegap.ch> writes:
>> 1) Go through all subrels asking for any interesting pathkey lists. Gather up
>> the union of all of these.
>
> I also tried to modify the Append node first, then figured that it might be
> better to base on the merge join node instead. While this seems farther away, I
> had the hope that a binary tree of such 'plain merge' nodes would require less
> comparisons in total.
It is kind of like a merge join but not quite. It's interleaving rows rather
than matching them up. It's more like the final merge of a sort which also
uses a heap to efficiently find the next value from the source tapes.
>> 3) It does seem to work when the columns in the subrels don't line up but I
>> didn't do anything special to handle this case.
>
> Uh.. is there any use case for that? WRT partitioning certainly not, is there?
Not necessarily but it is something Postgres supports and I don't think we
want to break it. Actually it's useful for partitioned tables if you build the
new partition in a separate table and then add it to the partitioned table. In
that case you may have gone through several steps of adding columns and
dropping them to get the structure to line up.
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