Re: Use merge-based matching for MCVs in eqjoinsel

Hi Tom!

On 17.11.2025 19:44, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
>> Actually, after sleeping on it it seems like the obvious thing is
>> to test "sslot1.nvalues * sslot2.nvalues", since the work we are
>> thinking about saving scales as that product. But I'm not sure
>> what threshold value to use if we do that. Maybe around 10000?
>
> Or maybe better, since we are considering an O(m*n) algorithm
> versus an O(m+n) one, we could check whether
>
> sslot1.nvalues * sslot2.nvalues - (sslot1.nvalues + sslot2.nvalues)
>
> exceeds some threshold. But that doesn't offer any insight into
> just what the threshold should be, either.

Good idea. How about using that formula and then determining the
threshold with a few experiments? Could be the JOB benchmark Ilia has
already set up or some synthetic test-cases.

Given that there's no one-size-fits-all constant anyways, that seems
good enough to me. Looking at [1], determining to set
MIN_ARRAY_SIZE_FOR_HASHED_SAOP to 9 was done the same way.

We could also include the operator costs for hashing and equality
comparison to make it more precise, in case they're easily accessible
at this point.

--
David Geier

[1]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAAaqYe8x62%2B%3Dwn0zvNKCj55tPpg-JBHzhZFFc6ANovdqFw7-dA%40mail.gmail.com