Re: Eager aggregation, take 3

On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 3:52 AM Richard Guo <guofenglinux(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> To avoid potential memory blowout risks from large partial aggregation
> values, v18 avoids applying eager aggregation if any aggregate uses an
> INTERNAL transition type, as this typically indicates a large internal
> data structure (as in string_agg or array_agg). However, this also
> excludes aggregates like avg(numeric) and sum(numeric), which are
> actually safe to use with eager aggregation.
>
> What we really want to exclude are aggregate functions that can
> produce large transition values by accumulating or concatenating input
> rows. So I'm wondering if we could instead check the transfn_oid
> directly and explicitly exclude only F_ARRAY_AGG_TRANSFN and
> F_STRING_AGG_TRANSFN. We don't need to worry about json_agg,
> jsonb_agg, or xmlagg, since they don't support partial aggregation
> anyway.

This strategy seems fairly unfriendly towards out-of-core code. Can
you come up with something that allows the author of a SQL-callable
function to include or exclude the function by a choice that is under
their control, rather than hard-coding something in PostgreSQL itself?

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com