Re: Default setting for enable_hashagg_disk

"David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> To be clear, by "escape hatch" you mean "add a GUC that instructs the
> PostgreSQL executor to ignore hash_mem when deciding whether to spill the
> contents of the hash table to disk - IOW to never spill the contents of a
> hash table to disk"? If so that seems separate from whether to add a
> hash_mem GUC to provide finer grained control - people may well want both.

If we define the problem narrowly as "allow people to get back exactly
the pre-v13 behavior", then yeah you'd need an escape hatch of that
sort. We should not, however, forget that the pre-v13 behavior is
pretty darn problematic. It's hard to see why anyone would really
want to get back exactly "never spill even if it leads to OOM".

The proposals for allowing a higher-than-work_mem, but not infinite,
spill boundary seem to me to be a reasonable way to accommodate cases
where the old behavior is accidentally preferable to what v13 does
right now. Moreover, such a knob seems potentially useful in its
own right, at least as a stopgap until we figure out how to generalize
or remove work_mem. (Which might be a long time.)

I'm not unalterably opposed to providing an escape hatch of the other
sort, but right now I think the evidence for needing it isn't there.
If we get field complaints that can't be resolved with the "raise the
spill threshold by X" approach, we could reconsider. But that approach
seems a whole lot less brittle than "raise the spill threshold to
infinity", so I think we should start with the former type of fix.

regards, tom lane