Re: MergeAppend costing

I wrote:
> What this example suggests is that we should consider ways to pass
> down the top-N-ness to sorts executed as part of a MergeAppend tree.
> That seems a tad messy though, both in the executor and the planner.

Actually the executor side of it doesn't seem too bad. A Limit node
already pokes the limit value into its child Sort node, and if that
doesn't make you gag, then recursing down through MergeAppend to poke
grandchild Sort nodes shouldn't either.

The planner is a bit messier: we really need to know the effective limit
value in create_merge_append_path in order to generate the right path
cost estimates, and that's many call levels removed from where the limit
is currently available. I think the least invasive way to do it is to
add the constant limit value (if known) as a field in PlannerInfo.
If that's set, *and* the MergeAppendPath is being made for the only "base
relation" in the query (ie, no joins allowed) then apply the limit while
costing any sorts needed.

Any objections to that approach?

BTW, while looking at this I came to the conclusion that the limit value
is being improperly applied in query_planner() ATM. We factor it into
a cost_sort call there, even in cases where the query has GROUP BY or
DISTINCT; but in such cases the tuples emitted from the join tree don't
necessarily each produce a result tuple, so it's wrong to assume that
"LIMIT n" means we can stop after n tuples. The effects of this are
probably relatively marginal, but it could cause us to make the wrong
decision about whether sorting is cheaper than a presorted path.

regards, tom lane