Re: [HACKERS] Re: attdisbursiont

> Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > Added to TODO.  This will improve VACUUM ANALYZE performance, thought I
> > don't think we have btree comparison functions for all data types,
> > though we should:
> 
> > * change VACUUM ANALYZE to use btree comparison functions, not <,=,> calls
> 
> There are several places that know more than they should about the
> meaning of "<" etc operators.  For example, the parser assumes it
> should use "<" and ">" to implement ORDER BY [DESC].  Making VACUUM
> not depend on specific names for the ordering operators will not
> improve life unless we fix *all* of these places.

Actually, I thought it would be good for performance reasons, not for
portability.  We would call one function per attribute instead of three.

> 
> Rather than depending on btree to tell us which way is up, maybe the
> pg_type row for a type ought to specify the standard ordering operators
> for the type directly.
> 
> While we are at it we could think about saying that there is just one
> "standard ordering operator" for a type and it yields a strcmp-like
> result (minus, zero, plus) rather than several ops yielding booleans.
> But that'd take a lot of changes in btree and everywhere else...
> 

The btree comparison functions do just that, returning -1,0,1 like
strcmp, for each type btree supports.

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