Re: POC: GROUP BY optimization

On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 6:44 PM jian he <jian(dot)universality(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 6:58 PM Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > Thank you for the fixes you've proposed. I didn't look much into
> > details yet, but I think the main concern Tom expressed in [1] is
> > whether the feature is reasonable at all. I think at this stage the
> > most important thing is to come up with convincing examples showing
> > how huge performance benefits it could cause. I will return to this
> > later today and will try to provide some convincing examples.
> >

hi.
previously preprocess_groupclause will not process cases
where no ORDER BY clause is specified.
commit 0452b461b will reorder the GROUP BY element even though no
ORDER BY clause is specified
, if there are associated indexes on it.
(hope I understand it correctly).

for example (when enable_hashagg is false)
explain(verbose) select count(*) FROM btg GROUP BY y,x;
in pg16 will not reorder, it will be as is: `GROUP BY y,x`

after commit 0452b461b, it will reorder to `GROUP BY x,y`.
because there is an index `btree (x, y)` (only one) associated with it.
if you drop the index `btree (x, y)` , it will be `GROUP BY y,x` as pg16.

This reordering GROUP BY element when no ORDER BY clause is not specified
is performant useful when the work_mem is small.
I've attached some tests comparing master with REL_16_STABLE to
demonstrate that.
all the tests attached are under the condition:
work_mem='64kB', buildtype=release, max_parallel_workers_per_gather=0.

one example:
CREATE TABLE btg5 AS
SELECT i::numeric % 10 AS x, i % 10 AS y, 'abc' || i % 10 AS z, i % 100000 AS w
FROM generate_series(1, 1e6) AS i;
CREATE INDEX btg5_x_y_idx ON btg5(x, y);

explain(analyze) SELECT count(*) FROM btg5 GROUP BY z, y, w, x;
in pg17, the execution time is: 746.574 ms
in pg16, the execution time is: 1693.483 ms

if I reorder it manually as:
`explain(analyze) SELECT count(*) FROM btg5 GROUP BY x, y, w, z;`
then in pg16, the execution time is 630.394 ms