4a29eabd1d
When incremental sorts were added in v13 a 1.5x pessimism factor was added to the cost modal. Seemingly this was done because the cost modal only has an estimate of the total number of input rows and the number of presorted groups. It assumes that the input rows will be evenly distributed throughout the presorted groups. The 1.5x pessimism factor was added to slightly reduce the likelihood of incremental sorts being used in the hope to avoid performance regressions where an incremental sort plan was picked and turned out slower due to a large skew in the number of rows in the presorted groups. An additional quirk with the path generation code meant that we could consider both a sort and an incremental sort on paths with presorted keys. This meant that with the pessimism factor, it was possible that we opted to perform a sort rather than an incremental sort when the given path had presorted keys. Here we remove the 1.5x pessimism factor to allow incremental sorts to have a fairer chance at being chosen against a full sort. Previously we would generally create a sort path on the cheapest input path (if that wasn't sorted already) and incremental sort paths on any path which had presorted keys. This meant that if the cheapest input path wasn't completely sorted but happened to have presorted keys, we would create a full sort path *and* an incremental sort path on that input path. Here we change this logic so that if there are presorted keys, we only create an incremental sort path, and create sort paths only when a full sort is required. Both the removal of the cost pessimism factor and the changes made to the path generation make it more likely that incremental sorts will now be chosen. That, of course, as with teaching the planner any new tricks, means an increased likelihood that the planner will perform an incremental sort when it's not the best method. Our standard escape hatch for these cases is an enable_* GUC. enable_incremental_sort already exists for this. This came out of a report by Pavel Luzanov where he mentioned that the master branch was choosing to perform a Seq Scan -> Sort -> Group Aggregate for his query with an ORDER BY aggregate function. The v15 plan for his query performed an Index Scan -> Group Aggregate, of course, the aggregate performed the final sort internally in nodeAgg.c for the aggregate's ORDER BY. The ideal plan would have been to use the index, which provided partially sorted input then use an incremental sort to provide the aggregate with the sorted input. This was not being chosen due to the pessimism in the incremental sort cost modal, so here we remove that and rationalize the path generation so that sort and incremental sort plans don't have to needlessly compete. We assume that it's senseless to ever use a full sort on a given input path where an incremental sort can be performed. Reported-by: Pavel Luzanov Reviewed-by: Richard Guo Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9f61ddbf-2989-1536-b31e-6459370a6baa%40postgrespro.ru
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.