Berkeley and CMU classes adopt/extend PostgreSQL

Hi all:
I emailed Marc Fournier on this topic some weeks back, but haven't
heard from him.

I am teaching the undergrad DB course at UC Berkeley, something I do
with some frequency. We have the usual 180 students we get every
semester (yep: 180!), but this year we've instituted 2 changes:

1) We changed the course projects to make the students hack PostgreSQL
internals, rather than the "minibase" eduware
2) We are coordinating the class with a class at CMU being taught by
Prof. Anastassia ("Natassa") Ailamaki

Our "Homework 2", which is being passed out this week, will ask the
students to implement a hash-based grouping that spills to disk. I
understand this topic has been batted about the pgsql-hackers list
recently. The TAs who've prepared the assignment (Sailesh
Krishnamurthy at Berkeley and Spiros Papadimitriou at CMU) have also
implemented a reference solution to assignment. Once we've got the
students' projects all turned in, we'll be very happy to contribute our
code back the PostgreSQL project.

I'm hopeful this will lead to many good things:

1) Each year we can pick another feature to assign in class, and
contribute back. We'll need to come up with well-scoped engine
features that exercise concepts from the class -- eventually we'll run
out of tractable things that PGSQL needs, but not in the next couple
years I bet.

2) We'll raise a crop of good students who know Postgres internals.
Roughly half the Berkeley EECS undergrads take the DB class, and all of
them will be post-hackers! (Again, I don't know the stats at CMU.)

So consider this a heads up on the hash-agg front, and on the future
contributions front. I'll follow up with another email on
PostgreSQL-centered research in our group at Berkeley as well.

Another favor I'd ask is that people on the list be a bit hesitant
about helping our students with their homework! We would like them to
do it themselves, more or less :-)

Regards,
Joe Hellerstein

--

Joseph M. Hellerstein
Professor, EECS Computer Science Division
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jmh

On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 06:54 PM, Sailesh Krishnamurthy
wrote:

> From: Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)tm(dot)ee>
> Date: Tue Feb 11, 2003 12:21:26 PM US/Pacific
> To: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> Cc: Bruno Wolff III <bruno(at)wolff(dot)to>, Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu>,
> pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Hash grouping, aggregates
>
>
> Tom Lane kirjutas T, 11.02.2003 kell 18:39:
>> Bruno Wolff III <bruno(at)wolff(dot)to> writes:
>>> Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>>> Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
>>>>> The neat thing is that hash aggregates would allow grouping on
>>>>> data types that
>>>>> have = operators but no useful < operator.
>>>>
>>>> Hm. Right now I think that would barf on you, because the parser
>>>> wants
>>>> to find the '<' operator to label the grouping column with, even if
>>>> the
>>>> planner later decides not to use it. It'd take some redesign of the
>>>> query data structure (specifically SortClause/GroupClause) to avoid
>>>> that.
>>
>>> I think another issue is that for some = operators you still might
>>> not
>>> be able to use a hash. I would expect the discussion for hash joins
>>> in
>>> http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/xoper-optimization.html
>>> would to hash aggregates as well.
>>
>> Right, the = operator must be hashable or you're out of luck. But we
>> could imagine tweaking the parser to allow GROUP BY if it finds a
>> hashable = operator and no sort operator. The only objection I can
>> see
>> to this is that it means the planner *must* use hash aggregation,
>> which
>> might be a bad move if there are too many distinct groups.
>
> If we run out of sort memory, we can always bail out later, preferrably
> with a descriptive error message. It is not as elegant as erring out at
> parse (or even plan/optimise) time, but the result is /almost/ the
> same.
>
> Relying on hash aggregation will become essential if we are ever going
> to implement the "other" groupings (CUBE, ROLLUP, (), ...), so it would
> be nice if hash aggregation could also overflow to disk - I suspect
> that
> this will still be faster that running an independent scan for each
> GROUP BY grouping and merging the results.
>
> -----
> Hannu
>
>
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> --
> Pip-pip
> Sailesh
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sailesh
>