Thread: How would sorting work with millions of rows in a huge DB with PG?

Hello all,

I was going through some papers related to sorting and since I am
studying PG code side by side, I wondered how sorting would be done on a
DB with millions of rows on disk with GBs of data. Since holding
everything in memory would not be the possible solution, how do we
actually sort the results in such conditions.

A pointer to some doc page or code would be great for me. 

Regards,
Vaibhav

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On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 05:20:02AM +0530, Vaibhav Kaushal wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I was going through some papers related to sorting and since I am
> studying PG code side by side, I wondered how sorting would be done on a
> DB with millions of rows on disk with GBs of data. Since holding
> everything in memory would not be the possible solution, how do we
> actually sort the results in such conditions.

Look for "external sort" and "external merge"

Regards
- -- tomás
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