Re: How does Postgres estimate the memory needed for sorting/aggregating

Tomas Vondra schrieb am 25.01.2017 um 22:46:
>> I guess this is based on the column statistics stored in pg_stats, but I
>> am not sure:
>>
>
> It is based on the average length of values in that column, yes.

Thanks for confirming that.

I assume this is taken from pg_stats.avg_width ?

> I'm not sure what you mean by 'dynamically resize'. The above
> decision is pretty much how planner decides whether to use hash
> aggregate or group aggregate. If we estimate that the hash aggregate
> will fit into work_mem, the planner will consider both possibilities.
> If the estimate says hash aggregate would not fit into work_mem,
> we'll only consider group aggregate, because that can work with very
> little memory.
>
> At execution time we'll only use as much memory as actually needed.
> The trouble is that if we under-estimated the amount of memory,
> there's no way back.

The "under-estimation" is what I am referring to with "dynamically resize".

What happens if the planner assumes 100kb but in reality it needs 100MB?

Thomas