Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Simon Riggs
Subject Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort)
Date
Msg-id CANP8+jJaGHCQb8aBuywkz8Ev9WJwSZrMkmtr2WciCFazhtsgcw@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort)  (James Coleman <jtc331@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort)
List pgsql-hackers
On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 16:10, James Coleman <jtc331@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 11:38:12PM -0400, James Coleman wrote:
>I think the first thing to do is get some concrete numbers on performance if we:
>
>1. Only sort one group at a time.
>2. Update the costing to prefer traditional sort unless we have very
>high confidence we'll win with incremental sort.
>
>It'd be nice not to have to add additional complexity if at all possible.

I've been focusing my efforts so far on seeing how much we can
eliminate performance penalties (relative to traditional sort). It
seems that if we can improve things enough there that we'd limit the
amount of adjustment needed to costing -- we'd still need to consider
cases where the lower startup cost results in picking significantly
different plans in a broad sense (presumably due to lower startup cost
and the ability to short circuit on a limit). But I'm hopeful then we
might be able to avoid having to consult MCV lists (and we wouldn't
have that available in all cases anyway)

As I see it the two most significant concerning cases right now are:
1. Very large batches (in particular where the batch is effectively
all of the matching rows such that we're really just doing a standard
sort).
2. Many very small batches.

What is the specific use case for this? This sounds quite general case.

Do we know something about the nearly-sorted rows that could help us? Or could we introduce some information elsewhere that would help with the sort?

Could we for-example, pre-sort the rows block by block, or filter out the rows that are clearly out of order, so we can re-merge them later?

--
Simon Riggs                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Solutions for the Enterprise

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