Re: killing processes

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 01:13:18PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
- David Kerr  writes:
- I tried it on a table with 899991 random values.  It took frickin'
- forever, but seemed to be willing to respond to cancels anywhere
- along the line.  I'm not sure why you're seeing differently.

Hehe, yeah. For me I let it run 10 min and hit ^C so maybe i just
hit it at a bad place.

- (The reason it takes forever is that numeric is a variable-width
- type, and access into a varwidth array is O(n), so the sorting
- step you've got here is O(n^2).  It might help to use unnest()
- instead of this handmade version of it ...)

unnest() is 8.4 only, right?

I'm actually probably just going to install R and use the median 
function from that.  (I was hoping to avoid installing all of R)

Or maybe i'll try my hand at a perl one and see if that gives
ok performance.

Thanks!

Dave