Re: Batching in executor

Hi Bruce,

On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 10:49 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 10:28:33PM +0900, Amit Langote wrote:
> > At PGConf.dev this year we had an unconference session [1] on whether
> > the community can support an additional batch executor. The discussion
> > there led me to start hacking on $subject. I have also had off-list
> > discussions on this topic in recent months with Andres and David, who
> > have offered useful thoughts.
> >
> > This patch series is an early attempt to make executor nodes pass
> > around batches of tuples instead of tuple-at-a-time slots. The main
> > motivation is to enable expression evaluation in batch form, which can
> > substantially reduce per-tuple overhead (mainly from function calls)
> > and open the door to further optimizations such as SIMD usage in
> > aggregate transition functions. We could even change algorithms of
> > some plan nodes to operate on batches when, for example, a child node
> > can return batches.
>
> For background, people might want to watch these two videos from POSETTE
> 2025. The first video explains how data warehouse query needs are
> different from OLTP needs:
>
> Building a PostgreSQL data warehouse
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpq4nfEoioE
>
> and the second one explains the executor optimizations done in PG 18:
>
> Hacking Postgres Executor For Performance
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3Ye9UlcR5Y
>
> I learned from these two videos that to handle new workloads, I need to
> think of the query demands differently, and of course can this be
> accomplished without hampering OLTP workloads?

Thanks for pointing to those talks -- I gave the second one. :-)

Yes, the idea here is to introduce batching without adding much
overhead or new code into the OLTP path.

--
Thanks, Amit Langote