Re: Overhead of union versus union all

Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Bruce Momjian<bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > Scott Bailey wrote:
> >> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> >> > Tim Keitt wrote:
> >> >> I am combining query results that I know are disjoint. I'm wondering
> >> >> how much overhead there is in calling union versus union all. (Just
> >> >> curious really; I can't see a reason not to use union all.)
> >> >
> >> > UNION needs to uniquify the output, for which it plasters an additional
> >> > sort step, whereas UNION ALL does not need to uniquify its output and
> >> > thus it can avoid the sort step. ?Using UNION ALL is recommended
> >> > wherever possible.
> >> >
> >>
> >> I think I read somewhere that as of 8.4 it no longer required the sort
> >> step, due to the improvements in hashing. Here it is
> >>
> >> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/WhatsNew84#Performance
> >
> > Oh, yea, hashing is used in some cases rather than sort. ?I assume sort
> > is still used if the hash exceeds workmem size.
>
> The important point being that it's still more expensive than a plain
> union all thought, right?

Yep.

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Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
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