Re: Parallel grouping sets - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

I glanced over both patches. Just the opposite, I have a hunch that v3
is always better than v5. Here's my 6-minute understanding of both.

v5 (the one with a simple partial aggregate) works by pushing a little
bit of partial aggregate onto workers, and perform grouping aggregate
above gather. This has two interesting outcomes: we can execute
unmodified partial aggregate on the workers, and execute almost
unmodified rollup aggreegate once the trans values are gathered. A
parallel plan for a query like

SELECT count(*) FROM foo GROUP BY GROUPING SETS (a), (b), (c), ();

can be

Finalize GroupAggregate
  Output: count(*)
  Group Key: a
  Group Key: b
  Group Key: c
  Group Key: ()
    Gather Merge
        Partial GroupAggregate
          Output: PARTIAL count(*)
          Group Key: a, b, c
            Sort
              Sort Key: a, b, c
                Parallel Seq Scan on foo

v3 ("the one with grouping set id") really turns the plan from a tree to
a multiplexed pipe: we can execute grouping aggregate on the workers,
but only partially. When we emit the trans values, also tag the tuple
with a group id. After gather, finalize the aggregates with a modified
grouping aggregate. Unlike a non-split grouping aggregate, the finalize
grouping aggregate does not "flow" the results from one rollup to the
next one. Instead, each group only advances on partial inputs tagged for
the group.

Finalize HashAggregate
  Output: count(*)
  Dispatched by: (GroupingSetID())
  Group Key: a
  Group Key: b
  Group Key: c
    Gather
        Partial GroupAggregate
          Output: PARTIAL count(*), GroupingSetID()
          Group Key: a
          Sort Key: b
          Group Key: b
          Sort Key: c
          Group Key: c
            Sort
              Sort Key: a
                Parallel Seq Scan on foo

Note that for the first approach to be viable, the partial aggregate
*has to* use a group key that's the union of all grouping sets. In cases

where individual columns have a low cardinality but joint cardinality is
high (say columns a, b, c each has 16 distinct values, but they are
independent, so there are 4096 distinct values on (a,b,c)), this results
in fairly high traffic through the shm tuple queue.