Saturday, November 14, 2015

Suggesting a corrected column name/spelling in the event of a column misspelling


One small PostgreSQL 9.5 feature I worked on is the new hinting mechanism feature, which sometimes hints, based on a score, what you might have meant to type following misspelling a column name in an SQL query. The score heavily weighs Levenshtein distance. A HINT message is sent to the client, which psql and other client tools will display by default.

It's common to not quite recall offhand if a column name is pluralized, or where underscores are used to break up words that make up the name of a column. This feature is targeted at that problem, providing guidance that allows the user to quickly adjust their query without mental context switching. For example:

postgres=# select * from orders where order_id = 5;
ERROR:  42703: column "order_id" does not exist
LINE 1: select * from orders where order_id = 5;
                                   ^
HINT:  Perhaps you meant to reference the column "orders"."orderid".

Friday, October 2, 2015

Avoid naming a constraint directly when using ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE

PostgreSQL 9.5 will have support for a feature that is popularly known as "UPSERT" - the ability to either insert or update a row according to whether an existing row with the same key exists. If such a row already exists, the implementation should update it. If not, a new row should be inserted. This is supported by way of a new high level syntax (a clause that extends the INSERT statement) that more or less relieves the application developer from having to give any thought to race conditions. This common operation for client applications is set to become far simpler and far less error-prone than legacy ad-hoc approaches to UPSERT involving subtransactions.

When we worked on UPSERT, many edge-cases were carefully considered. A technique called "unique index inference" allows DML statement authors to be very explicit about what condition they want to take the alternative (UPDATE or NOTHING) path on. That alternative path can only be taken in the event of a would-be duplicate violation in an "arbiter" unique index (for the DO NOTHING variant, a would-be exclusion violation is also a possible reason to take the alternative NOTHING path). The ability to write UPSERT statements explicitly and safely while also having lots of flexibility is an important differentiator for PostgreSQL's UPSERT in my view.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Abbreviated keys for numeric to accelerate numeric sorts

Andrew Gierth's numeric abbreviated keys patch was committed recently. This commit added abbreviation/sortsupport for the numeric type (the PostgreSQL type which allows practically arbitrary precision, typically recommended for representing monetary values).

The encoding scheme that Andrew came up with is rather clever - it has an excellent tendency to concentrate entropy from the original values into the generated abbreviated keys in real world cases. As far as accelerating sorts goes, numeric abbreviation is at least as effective as the original text abbreviation scheme. I easily saw improvements of 6x-7x with representative queries that did not spill to disk (i.e. that used quicksort). In essence, the patch makes sorting numeric values almost as cheap as sorting simple integers, since that is often all that is actually required during sorting proper (the abbreviated keys compare as integers, except that the comparison is inverted to comport with how abbreviation builds abbreviated values from numerics as tuples are copied into local memory ahead of sorting - see the patch for exact details).

Friday, January 23, 2015

Abbreviated keys: exploiting locality to improve PostgreSQL's text sort performance


On Monday, Robert Haas committed a patch of mine that considerably speeds up the sorting of text in PostgreSQL. This was the last and the largest in a series of such patches, the patch that adds "abbreviated keys". PostgreSQL 9.5 will have big improvements in sort performance.

In realistic cases, CREATE INDEX operations on text are over 3 times faster than in PostgreSQL 9.4. Not every such utility operation, or data warehousing query involving a big sort is sped up by that much, but many will be.

This was a piece of work that I spent a considerable amount of time on over the past few months. It's easy to justify that effort, though: sorting text is a very fundamental capability of any database system. Sorting is likely the dominant cost when creating B-Tree indexes, performing CLUSTER operations, and, most obviously, for sort nodes that are required by many plans that are executed in the service of queries with ORDER BY or DISTINCT clauses, or aggregates using the GroupAggregate strategy. Most of the utility statements that need to perform sorts must perform them with a very disruptive lock on the target relation (CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY is a notable exception), so quite apart from the expense of the sort, the duration of sorts often strongly influences how long a production system is seriously disrupted.