Re: Inlining comparators as a performance optimisation

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> I'll take another crack at it. I'm not entirely sold yet on merging
>> the two structs; I think first we'd better look and see what the needs
>> are in the other potential callers I mentioned. If we'd end up
>> cluttering the struct with half a dozen weird fields, it'd be better to
>> stick to a minimal interface struct with various wrapper structs, IMO.

> OK. I'll defer to whatever you come up with after looking at it.

OK, it looks like nodeMergeAppend.c could use something exactly like the
draft SortKey struct, while nodeMergejoin.c could embed such a struct in
MergeJoinClauseData. The btree stuff needs something more nearly
equivalent to a ScanKey, including a datum-to-compare-to and a flags
field. I'm inclined to think the latter would be too specialized to put
in the generic struct. On the other hand, including the reverse and
nulls_first flags in the generic struct is clearly a win since it allows
ApplyComparator() to be defined as a generic function. So the only
thing that's really debatable is the attno field, and I'm not anal
enough to insist on a separate level of struct just for that.

I am however inclined to stick with the shortened struct name SortSupport
rather than using SortKey. The presence of the function pointer fields
(especially the inlined-qsort pointers, assuming we adopt some form of
Peter's patch) changes the struct's nature in my view; it's not really
describing just a sort key (ie an ORDER BY column specification).

regards, tom lane