Re: tuple radix sort

On Wed, Nov 12, 2025 at 9:28 PM David Geier <geidav(dot)pg(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I've also been looking into radix sort the last days to accelerate GIN
> index builds. Ordering and removing duplicates requires a fast sort in
> generate_trgm().

If that's the case then I suggest first seeing if dfd8e6c73ee made
things any worse. A simpler possible improvement is to use a similar
normalization step for the chars, if needed, then do the sort and
quinique with a specialization for unsigned chars. (We don't yet
specialize qunique, but that can be remedied). If you're interested,
please start a separate thread for that.

> What would be great is if we could build a generic radix sort
> implementation, similarly to sort_template.h that can be used in other
> places. We would have to think a bit about the interface because instead
> of a comparator we would require some radix extraction callback.

That's moving the goalposts too far IMO. I want to get to a place
where I feel comfortable with the decisions made, and that already
requires a lot of testing. Also, I don't want to risk introducing
abstractions that make future improvements to tuplesort more
cumbersome.

--
John Naylor
Amazon Web Services