Re: POC: GROUP BY optimization

On 4/12/24 06:44, Tom Lane wrote:
> * Speaking of pathnodes.h, PathKeyInfo is a pretty uninformative node
> type name, and the comments provided for it are not going to educate
> anybody.  What is the "association" between the pathkeys and clauses?
> I guess the clauses are supposed to be SortGroupClauses, but not all
> pathkeys match up to SortGroupClauses, so what then?  This is very
> underspecified, and fuzzy thinking about data structures tends to lead
> to bugs.
I'm not the best in English documentation and naming style. So, feel 
free to check my version.
> 
> So I'm quite afraid that there are still bugs lurking here.
> What's more, given that the plans this patch makes apparently
> seldom win when you don't put a thumb on the scales, it might
> take a very long time to isolate those bugs.  If the patch
> produces a faulty plan (e.g. not sorted properly) we'd never
> notice if that plan isn't chosen, and even if it is chosen
> it probably wouldn't produce anything as obviously wrong as
> a crash.
I added checkings on the proper order of pathkeys and clauses.
  If you really care about that, we should spend additional time and 
rewrite the code to generate an order of clauses somewhere in the plan 
creation phase. For example, during the create_group_plan call, we could 
use the processed_groupClause list, cycle through subpath->pathkeys, set 
the order, and detect whether the pathkeys list corresponds to the 
group-by or is enough to build a grouping plan.
Anyway, make this part of code more resistant to blunders is another story.

-- 
regards,
Andrei Lepikhov
Postgres Professional