Improve the comparison of NUMERIC data

I think that NUMERIC datatype has a problem in the performance that
the format on Tuple(Numeric) and the format to calculate(NumericVar)
are different. I understood that to reduce I/O. However, when many
comparisons or calculations of NUMERIC are executed, the conversion
of Numeric and NumericVar becomes a bottleneck.

It is profile result when "create index on NUMERIC column" is executed:

% cumulative self self total
time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
17.61 10.27 10.27 34542006 0.00 0.00 cmp_numerics
11.90 17.21 6.94 34542006 0.00 0.00 comparetup_index
7.42 21.54 4.33 71102587 0.00 0.00 AllocSetAlloc
7.02 25.64 4.09 69084012 0.00 0.00 set_var_from_num
4.87 28.48 2.84 69084012 0.00 0.00 alloc_var
4.79 31.27 2.79 142205745 0.00 0.00 AllocSetFreeIndex
4.55 33.92 2.65 34542004 0.00 0.00 cmp_abs
4.07 36.30 2.38 71101189 0.00 0.00 AllocSetFree
3.83 38.53 2.23 69084012 0.00 0.00 free_var

The create index command executes many comparisons of Numeric values.
Functions other than comparetup_index spent a lot of cycles for
conversion from Numeric to NumericVar.

An attached patch enables the comparison of Numeric values without
executing conversion to NumericVar. The execution time of that SQL
becomes half.

o Test SQL (index_test table has 1,000,000 tuples)
create index index_test_idx on index_test(num_col);

o Test results (executed the test five times)
(1)PentiumIII
original: 39.789s 36.823s 36.737s 37.752s 37.019s
patched : 18.560s 19.103s 18.830s 18.408s 18.853s

(2)Pentium4
original: 16.349s 14.997s 12.979s 13.169s 12.955s
patched : 7.005s 6.594s 6.770s 6.740s 6.828s

(3)Itanium2
original: 15.392s 15.447s 15.350s 15.370s 15.417s
patched : 7.413s 7.330s 7.334s 7.339s 7.339s

(4)Ultra Sparc
original: 64.435s 59.336s 59.332s 58.455s 59.781s
patched : 28.630s 28.666s 28.983s 28.744s 28.595s

regards,

--- Atsushi Ogawa