Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2019 02:17:11 +0200
From: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
To: James Coleman <jtc331@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Rafia Sabih <rafia.pghackers@gmail.com>,
	Shaun Thomas <shaun.thomas@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>,
	Alexander Korotkov <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort)
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On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 01:34:22PM +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>
> ...
>
>I wonder if we're approaching this wrong. Maybe we should not reverse
>engineer queries for the various places, but just start with a set of
>queries that we want to optimize, and then identify which places in the
>planner need to be modified.
>

I've decided to do a couple of experiments, trying to make my mind about
which modified places matter to diffrent queries. But instead of trying
to reverse engineer the queries, I've taken a different approach - I've
compiled a list of queries that I think are sensible and relevant, and
then planned them with incremental sort enabled in different places.

I don't have any clear conclusions at this point - it does show some of
the places don't change plan for any of the queries, although there may
be some additional query where it'd make a difference.

But I'm posting this mostly because it might be useful. I've initially
planned to move changes that add incremental sort paths to separate
patches, and then apply/skip different subsets of those patches. But
then I realized there's a better way to do this - I've added a bunch of
GUCs, one for each such place. This allows doing this testing without
having to rebuild repeatedly.

I'm not going to post the patch(es) with extra GUCs here, because it'd
just confuse the patch tester, but it's available here:

  https://github.com/tvondra/postgres/tree/incremental-sort-20190730

There are 10 GUCs, one for each place in planner where incremental sort
paths are constructed. By default all those are set to 'false' so no
incremental sort paths are built. If you do

  SET devel_create_ordered_paths = on;

it'll start creating the paths in non-parallel in create_ordered_paths.
Then you may enable devel_create_ordered_paths_parallel to also consider
parallel paths, etc.

The list of queries (synthetic, but hopefully sufficiently realistic)
and a couple of scripts to collect the plans is in this repository:

  https://github.com/tvondra/incremental-sort-tests-2

There's also a spreadsheet with a summary of results, with a visual
representation of which GUCs affect which queries.


regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services