Re: Does IMMUTABLE property propagate?

The immutable property had nothing to do with caching results. Postgres
never caches the results of functions. The immutable property is used top
determine if it's safe to use indexes or other plans that avoid evaluating
an expression repeatedly.

On 6 Mar 2010 02:45, "Petru Ghita" <petrutz(at)venaver(dot)info> wrote:

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Given f1(x) as IMMUTABLE and f2(x) as IMMUTABLE, and f3(f1,f2) as
IMMUTABLE, does the query planner cache the result of f3 and reuse it
or if you want to get a little more speed you better explicitly define
yourself f3 as IMMUTABLE?

I had an aggregate query like:

select id,
sum(p1*f1(a)/f2(b) as r1,
sum(p2*f1(a)/f2(b) as r2,
...
sum(pn*f1(a)/f2(b) as rn

...
group by id;

Where f1(x) and f2(x) were defined as IMMUTABLE.

By the experiments I ran looks like after defining a new function
f3(a,b):= f1(a)/f2(b) and rewriting the query as:

select id,
sum(p1*f3(a,b) as r1,
sum(p2*f3(a,b) as r2,
...
sum(pn*f3(a,b) as rn

...
group by id;

*Looks like* I got a little (5%) improvement in performance of the
query. Is there a way to find out if the function is re-evaluated each
time?
Is this the recommended way to proceed?

Thank you!

Petru Ghita
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