Re: Timsort performance, quicksort

Peter Geoghegan <peter@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> 1.  What we should be doing with timsort, if anything.  It is one
> thing to demonstrate that it's a useful algorithm under certain
> artificial conditions, but quite another to argue for its inclusion in
> Postgres, or for it being selectively used at points where that is
> likely to be a win, based on some criteria or another like known
> cardinality, physical/logical correlation or assumed costs of
> comparisons for each type.  At the very least, it is an interesting
> algorithm, but without integration that makes it actually serve user
> needs, that's all it will ever be to us.  Deciding if and when it
> should be used is a rather nuanced process, and I'm certainly not
> about to declare that we should get rid of quicksort.  It does appear
> to be a fairly good fit to some of our requirements though.

I kind of understood timsort would shine in sorting text in non-C
collation, because of the comparison cost. So a test in some UTF8
collation or other would be interesting, right?

Regards,
-- 
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr     PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support