Re: Global temporary tables

I did more investigations of performance of global temp tables with
shared buffers vs. vanilla (local) temp tables.

1. Combination of persistent and temporary tables in the same query.

Preparation:
create table big(pk bigint primary key, val bigint);
insert into big values
(generate_series(1,100000000),generate_series(1,100000000));
create temp table lt(key bigint, count bigint);
create global temp table gt(key bigint, count bigint);

Size of table is about 6Gb, I run this test on desktop with 16GB of RAM
and postgres with 1Gb shared buffers.
I run two queries:

insert into T (select count(*),pk/P as key from big group by key);
select sum(count) from T;

where P is (100,10,1) and T is name of temp table (lt or gt).
The table below contains times of both queries in msec:

Percent of selected data
1%
10%
100%
Local temp table
44610
90
47920
891
63414
21612
Global temp table
44669
35
47939
298
59159
26015

As you can see, time of insertion in temporary table is almost the same
and time of traversal of temporary table is about twice smaller for
global temp table
when it fits in RAM together with persistent table and slightly worser
when it doesn't fit.

2. Temporary table only access.
The same system, but Postgres is configured with shared_buffers=10GB,
max_parallel_workers = 4, max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 4

Local temp tables:
create temp table local_temp(x1 bigint, x2 bigint, x3 bigint, x4 bigint,
x5 bigint, x6 bigint, x7 bigint, x8 bigint, x9 bigint);
insert into local_temp values
(generate_series(1,100000000),0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0);
select sum(x1) from local_temp;

Global temp tables:
create global temporary table global_temp(x1 bigint, x2 bigint, x3
bigint, x4 bigint, x5 bigint, x6 bigint, x7 bigint, x8 bigint, x9 bigint);
insert into global_temp values
(generate_series(1,100000000),0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0);
select sum(x1) from global_temp;

Results (msec):

Insert
Select
Local temp table 37489
48322
Global temp table 44358
3003

So insertion in local temp table is performed slightly faster but select
is 16 times slower!

Conclusion:
In the assumption then temp table fits in memory, global temp tables
with shared buffers provides better performance than local temp table.
I didn't consider here global temp tables with local buffers because for
them results should be similar with local temp tables.

--
Konstantin Knizhnik
Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
The Russian Postgres Company