Re: Inlining comparators as a performance optimisation

Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On the subject of highly ambitious optimisations to sorting, one
> possibility I consider much more practicable than GPU-accelerated
> sorting is simple threading; quicksort can be parallelised very
> effectively, due to its divide-and-conquer nature. If we could agree
> on a threading abstraction more sophisticated than forking, it's
> something I'd be interested in looking at. To do so would obviously
> entail lots of discussion about how that relates to whatever way we
> eventually decide on implementing parallel query, and that's obviously
> a difficult discussion.

I agree that the next big challenge for Postgres is parallel operations.
With the number of cores increasing, and with increased memory and SSD,
parallel operation is even more important. Rather than parallelizing
the entire backend, I imagine adding threading or helper processes for
things like sorts, index scans, executor nodes, and stored procedure
languages. I expect final code to be 2-3 years in the future.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +