Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Fix an oversight in the 8.2 patch that improved mergejoin

Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 13:06 +0100, Gregory Stark wrote:
>> Is that right? The materialize is just doing the same writing that the final
>> pass of the sort would have been doing. Did we discount the costs for sort for
>> that skipping writing that final pass when that was done?

> IIRC the cost of the sort didn't include the final merge, so when we
> avoided the final merge the cost model for the sort became accurate.
> Perhaps we should add something when we don't do that.

> It seems reasonable than an extra node should cost something anyhow, and
> the per tuple cost is the current standard way of indicating that extra
> cost.

Well, the problem with the previous coding was that the costs assigned
to the various nodes simply failed to add up, because the materialize
node injected by create_mergejoin_plan had not been accounted for at all
in the Path costs. It's fair to question whether cost_sort couldn't be
improved to create a more accurate estimate of what's likely to happen
at runtime given recent changes in the sort code --- but that would be a
distinct issue. I'm not entirely sure how to give cost_sort enough
context info, anyway.

regards, tom lane