The inner loop in switchToPresortedPrefixMode() can be implemented
as a conventional integer-counter for() loop, removing a couple of
redundant boolean state variables. The old logic here was a remnant
of earlier development, but as things now stand there's no reason
for extra complexity.
Also, annotate the test case added by 82e0e2930 to explain why it
manages to hit the corner case fixed in that commit, and add an
EXPLAIN to verify that it's creating an incremental-sort plan.
Back-patch to v13, like the previous patch.
James Coleman and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16846-ae49f51ac379a4cb@postgresql.org
switchToPresortedPrefixMode() did the wrong thing if it detected
a batch boundary just at the last tuple of a fullsort group.
The initially-reported symptom was a "retrieved too many tuples in a
bounded sort" error, but the test case added here just silently gives
the wrong answer without this patch.
I (tgl) am not really happy about committing this patch without review
from the incremental-sort authors, but they seem AWOL and we are hard
against a release deadline. This does demonstrably make some cases
better, anyway.
Per bug #16846 from Yoran Heling. Back-patch to v13 where incremental
sort was introduced.
Neil Chen
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16846-ae49f51ac379a4cb@postgresql.org
Commit 6ee3b5fb99 cleaned up most of the long/int64 confusion related to
incremental sort, but the sort debug messages were still using %ld for
int64 variables. So fix that.
Author: Haiying Tang
Backpatch-through: 13, where the incremental sort code was added
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/4250be9d350c4992abb722a76e288aef%40G08CNEXMBPEKD05.g08.fujitsu.local
Includes some manual cleanup of places that pgindent messed up,
most of which weren't per project style anyway.
Notably, it seems some people didn't absorb the style rules of
commit c9d297751, because there were a bunch of new occurrences
of function calls with a newline just after the left paren, all
with faulty expectations about how the rest of the call would get
indented.
ExecReScanIncrementalSort was resetting bounded=false, which means the
optimization would be disabled on all rescans. This happens because
ExecSetTupleBound is called before the rescan, not after it.
Author: James Coleman
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200414065336.GI1492@paquier.xyz
The executor flags were not handled entirely correctly, although the
bugs were mostly harmless and it was mostly comment inaccuracy. We don't
need to strip any of the flags for child nodes.
Incremental sort does not support backward scans of mark/restore, so
MARK/BACKWARDS flags should not be possible. So we simply ensure this
using an assert, and we don't bother removing them when initializing
the child node.
With REWIND it's a bit less clear - incremental sort does not support
REWIND, but there is no way to signal this - it's legal to just ignore
the flag. We however continue passing the flag to child nodes, because
they might be useful to leverage that.
Reported-by: Michael Paquier
Author: James Coleman
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200414065336.GI1492@paquier.xyz
Incremental Sort is an optimized variant of multikey sort for cases when
the input is already sorted by a prefix of the requested sort keys. For
example when the relation is already sorted by (key1, key2) and we need
to sort it by (key1, key2, key3) we can simply split the input rows into
groups having equal values in (key1, key2), and only sort/compare the
remaining column key3.
This has a number of benefits:
- Reduced memory consumption, because only a single group (determined by
values in the sorted prefix) needs to be kept in memory. This may also
eliminate the need to spill to disk.
- Lower startup cost, because Incremental Sort produce results after each
prefix group, which is beneficial for plans where startup cost matters
(like for example queries with LIMIT clause).
We consider both Sort and Incremental Sort, and decide based on costing.
The implemented algorithm operates in two different modes:
- Fetching a minimum number of tuples without check of equality on the
prefix keys, and sorting on all columns when safe.
- Fetching all tuples for a single prefix group and then sorting by
comparing only the remaining (non-prefix) keys.
We always start in the first mode, and employ a heuristic to switch into
the second mode if we believe it's beneficial - the goal is to minimize
the number of unnecessary comparions while keeping memory consumption
below work_mem.
This is a very old patch series. The idea was originally proposed by
Alexander Korotkov back in 2013, and then revived in 2017. In 2018 the
patch was taken over by James Coleman, who wrote and rewrote most of the
current code.
There were many reviewers/contributors since 2013 - I've done my best to
pick the most active ones, and listed them in this commit message.
Author: James Coleman, Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Tomas Vondra, Andreas Karlsson, Marti Raudsepp, Peter Geoghegan, Robert Haas, Thomas Munro, Antonin Houska, Andres Freund, Alexander Kuzmenkov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdscOX5an71nHd8WSUH6GNOCf=V7wgDaTXdDd9=goN-gfA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfds1waRZ=NOmueYq0sx1ZSCnt+5QJvizT8ndT2=etZEeAQ@mail.gmail.com
