Re: asynchronous and vectorized execution

On 2016-05-10 12:34:19 +1200, David Rowley wrote:
> a. Modify ScanAPI to allow batch tuple fetching in predefined batch sizes.
> b. Modify TupleTableSlot to allow > 1 tuple to be stored. Add flag to
> indicate if the struct contains a single or a multiple tuples.
> Multiple tuples may need to be deformed in a non-lazy fashion in order
> to prevent too many buffers from having to be pinned at once. Tuples
> will be deformed into arrays of each column rather than arrays for
> each tuple (this part is important to support the next sub-project)

FWIW, I don't think that's necessarily required, and it has the
potential to slow down some operations (like target list
processing/projections) considerably. By the time vectored execution for
postgres is ready, gather instructions should be common and fast enough
(IIRC they started to be ok with broadwells, and are better in skylake;
other archs had them for longer).

> c. Modify some nodes (perhaps start with nodeAgg.c) to allow them to
> process a batch TupleTableSlot. This will require some tight loop to
> aggregate the entire TupleTableSlot at once before returning.
> d. Add function in execAmi.c which returns true or false depending on
> if the node supports batch TupleTableSlots or not.
> e. At executor startup determine if the entire plan tree supports
> batch TupleTableSlots, if so enable batch scan mode.

It doesn't really need to be the entire tree. Even if you have a subtree
(say a parametrized index nested loop join) which doesn't support batch
mode, you'll likely still see performance benefits by building a batch
one layer above the non-batch-supporting node.

Greetings,

Andres Freund