Re: sequential scan result order vs performance

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> It's quite easy to change iteration so we start with the latest item,
> and iterate till the first, rather than the other way round. In
> benchmarks with somewhat wide columns and aggregation, this yields
> speedups of over 30%, before hitting other bottlenecks.

> I do wonder however if it's acceptable to change the result order of
> sequential scans.

I think there will be a lot of howls.  People expect that creating
a table by inserting a bunch of rows, and then reading back those
rows, will not change the order.  We already futzed with that guarantee
a bit with syncscans, but that only affects quite large tables --- and
even there, we were forced to provide a way to turn it off.

If you were talking about 3X then maybe it would be worth it, but for 30%
(on a subset of queries) I am not excited.

I wonder whether we could instead adjust the rules for insertion so
that tuples tend to be physically in order by itemid.  I'm imagining
leaving two "holes" in a page and sometimes (hopefully not often)
having to shift data during insert to preserve the ordering.
        regards, tom lane