GROUP BY on a large table -- an idea

Recently I've been playing with quite a big table (over 50mln rows),
and did some SELECT ... sum(...) WHERE ... GROUP BY ... queries.

The usual plan for these is to sort the entries according to GROUP BY
specification, then to run aggregates one by one. If the data to be
sorted is large enough, PostgreSQL has no other option than to spill
to disk, which well, Isn't the fastest...

Then I thought, why not skip the sorting, and do something like this,
say a table is:
kind tetx, sumkind text, cnt int, size int
foo, bar, 2, 10
blah, argh, 23, 3
foo, baz, 1, 20
blah, argh, 23, 3
and the query would be:
SELECT kind,subkind,sum(cnt),sum(size) FROM x GROUP BY kind,subkind;
Instead of sorting, we would create an empty temporary state variable tree,
looked up "foo, bar" in that tree -- if not found, enter there a new
initialized
state variables for sum(cnt) and sum(size).
looked up blah, argh -- create the state variables
looked up foo, baz -- create the state variables
looked up blah,argh -- update the state variables there.
And finally dump the whole tree as results of our query:
foo, bar, 2, 10
foo, baz, 1, 20
blah, argh, 46,6

Of course first thing you'll notice is that the "looking up" part will probably
eat all benefits from not spilling, and if group by columns have large
cardinality we'd have to spill anyway. But then I thought, maybe a hybrid
approach could be benefitial, and its' the resason I'm sending this message.

The hybrid approach means: sort as much as you can without spilling to
disk, then aggregate and store aggregate state variables in safe place
(like a "tree" above), get more tuples from the table, sort them, update
aggregate state variables, lather, rince, repeat.

This should avoid the need to spill to disk. The cost of such operation
depends on cardinality of GROUP BY part (and their correlation, doh),
so it might be wise to try this approach for promising data only.

I have yet almost no knowledge od PostgreSQL's internals, but I think
the idea is feasible therefore I post it here. If it's been proposed before,
forgive me.

Regards,
Dawid