Re: Review: listagg aggregate

2010/1/24 Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>:
> On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 11:14 -0800, David E.Wheeler wrote:
>> No performance issues
>
> ISTM that this class of function is inherently dangerous performance
> wise.

there is potencial risk, but this risk isn't new. The almost all what
you say is true for array aggregates.

>
> * It looks incredibly easy to construct enormous lists. We should test
> the explosion limit of this to see how it is handled. Perhaps we need
> some parameter limits to control that, depending upon results.

There are no limit for generating large values - like bytea, xml, or
text. There are not limit for array_accum or array(query). So, I don't
think we need some special mechanism for listagg. If somebody will
generate too large a value, then he will get "out of memory"
exception.

>
> * Optimizer doesn't consider whether the result type of an aggregate get
> bigger as the aggregate processes more rows. If we're adding this
> function we should give some thought in that area also, or at least a
> comment to note that it can and will cause the optimizer problems in
> complex queries.
>

this is true, but this isn't some new. array_accum working well
without optimizer problems.

> --
>  Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.com
>
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