On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@heroku.com> wrote: > The numbers speak for themselves here. I just want to be clear about > the disadvantages of what I propose, even if it's well worth it > overall in most (all?) cases.
There is a paper called "Critical Evaluation of Existing External Sorting Methods in the Perspective of Modern Hardware": http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1343/paper8.pdf This paper was not especially influential, and I don't agree with every detail, or I at least don't think that every recommendation should be adopted to Postgres. Even still, the paper is the best summary I have seen so far. It clearly explains why there is plenty to recommend a simple hybrid sort-merge strategy over replacement selection, despite the fact that replacement selection is faster when using 1970s hardware. -- Peter Geoghegan -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers