Re: Allow multi-byte characters as escape in SIMILAR TO and SUBSTRING

On 07/12/2014 05:16 AM, Jeff Davis wrote:
> I was able to see about a 2% increase in runtime when using the
> similar_escape function directly. I made a 10M tuple table and did:
>
> explain analyze
> select
> similar_escape('ΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣ','#') from t;
>
> which was the worst reasonable case I could think of. (It appears that
> selecting from a table is faster than from generate_series. I'm curious
> what you use when testing the performance of an individual function at
> the SQL level.)

A large table like that is what I usually do. A large generate_series()
spends a lot of time building the tuplestore, especially if it doesn't
fit in work_mem and spills to disk. Sometimes I use this to avoid it:

explain analyze
select
similar_escape('ΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣΣ','#')
from generate_series(1, 10000) a, generate_series(1,1000);

although in my experience it still has somewhat more overhead than a
straight seqscan because.

- Heikki