Re: Hmm, nodeUnique doesn't really support backwards scan too well

"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> We could probably fix this by complicating the logic in ExecUnique,
> but I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to just stop treating
> Unique nodes as backwards-scannable.  The only reason for that
> node type to exist (as opposed to using Group nodes) is that it's
> simple and low-overhead.  So complicating it to support a corner case
> that no one has noticed in many years might be counterproductive.
> Thoughts?

Hm, that has the nasty side effect that someone who uses SCROLL but doesn't
fetch backwards much or at all suddenly gets a much more expensive plan than
if they didn't.

On the other hand someone who does actually use the scrollability of the
cursor to fetch forward and backwards a lot, repeatedly fetching the same
records, would actually get significantly better performance out of a
materialized result than having to skip over the duplicates repeatedly.

--
  Gregory Stark
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