On 12/28/2015 11:38 AM, David Rowley wrote:
On 28 December 2015 at 23:23, Tomas Vondra <tomas.von...@2ndquadrant.com
<mailto:tomas.von...@2ndquadrant.com>> wrote:

    On 12/28/2015 03:15 AM, David Rowley wrote:

        Maybe it would be better to, once the filter is built, simply
        count the

        number of 1 bits and only use the filter if there's less than
        <threshold> 1 bits compared to the size of the filter in bits.
        There's
        functionality in bms_num_members() to do this, and there's
        also __builtin_popcount() in newer version of GCC, which we
        could have
        some wrapper around, perhaps.


    I don't really see how this is relevant with the previous point. The
    number of 1s in the bitmap can tell you the false positive rate for
    the bloom filter, not what fraction of lookups will be answered with
    "true".

    So while this needs to be watched, so that we stop using the bloom
    filter when it gets too full (e.g. due to under-estimate), it's
    completely unrelated to the previous issue.


Why is it not related? this has got me confused. If a bloom filter has
all of the bits set to 1, then it will never filter any Tuples right?

Because the false positive rate can be computed without having to look at the lookups. So it's inherently independent on the ordering of outer relation, and so on.

If so, then a filter with all 1 bits set should be thrown away, as
it'll never help us, and the filter should generally become more
worthwhile as it contains a higher ratio of 0 bits vs 1 bits. Of
course we don't have a count of how many Tuples matched each bit, so
this is based on the assumption that each bit matches an equal number
of Tuples. Are you saying this is not an assumption that we should
make?

Sure we should check that. All I'm saying is it has nothing to do with the first problem described in the first part of the e-mail.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services


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