Re: [PATCH] Negative Transition Aggregate Functions (WIP)

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От David Rowley
Тема Re: [PATCH] Negative Transition Aggregate Functions (WIP)
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Msg-id CAApHDvpRuu9_nCXe2grZqrcQVTdg++Ht6oh9E7bR4NWLbLQewQ@mail.gmail.com
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Ответ на Re: [PATCH] Negative Transition Aggregate Functions (WIP)  (Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org>)
Ответы Re: [PATCH] Negative Transition Aggregate Functions (WIP)  (David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>)
Re: [PATCH] Negative Transition Aggregate Functions (WIP)  (Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org>)
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On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org> wrote:
First, I've go the feeling that I should somehow update the commitfest app,
but I don't really know in which way. Should I put myself in as a reviewer,
or as a second author? Or neither? Suggestions welcome...


We I guess you're both now, but it's a bit weird to be author and reviewer so I've put your name against author too, hopefully Dean can review our combined results and we can review each other's work at the same time.
 
On Jan17, 2014, at 23:34 , David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> The test turned out to become:
>       if (state->expectedScale == -1)
>               state->expectedScale = X.dscale;
>       else if (state->expectedScale != X.dscale)
>               state->expectedScale = -2;
>
> In do_numeric_accum, then when we do the inverse I just check if
> expectedScale < 0 then return NULL.

Ok, so this will rescan if and only if the dscales of all inputs match.
I still that's overly pessimistic - we've only got a problem when we
removed the input with the largest dscale, no? So my suggestion would be

  state->maxDScale = MAX(X.dscale, state->maxDScale);

in do_numeric_accum, and in the inverse

  if (state->maxDScane == X.dscale)
    return PG_RETURN_NULL;

I'd think that this avoids more restarts without about the same effort,
but I haven't tried this though, so maybe I'm missing something.


This is not quite right as it means if all the values are the same then
we reject inverse transitions since state->maxScale will always be equal to X.dscale.
But you are right about the overly strict code I've put in, we should allow values with a less than the maximum dscale to be unaggregated without complaint. To implement this I needed a maxScaleCounter variable too so we only reject when the maxScaleCounter gets back to 0 again. 

Note that after this fix the results for my quick benchmark now look like:

create table num (num numeric(10,2) not null);
insert into num (num) select * from generate_series(1,20000);
select sum(num) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 113 ms
select sum(num / 10) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 156ms
select sum(num / 1) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 144 ms

So it seems to be much less prone to falling back to brute force forward transitions. 
It also seems the / 10 version must have had to previously do 1 brute force rescan but now it looks like it can do it in 1 scan.

> I'm not set on it, and I'm willing to try the lazy zeroing of the scale
> tracker array, but I'm just not quite sure what extra real use cases it
> covers that the one above does not. Perhaps my way won't perform inverse
> transitions if the query did sum(numericCol / 10) or so.

Dunno how many people SUM over numerics with different dscales. Easily
possible that it's few enough to not be worth fussing over.


Going by Tom's comments in the post above this is possible just by having an unconstrained numeric column, but I guess there's still a good chance that even those unconstrained numbers have the same scale or at least the scale will likely not vary wildly enough to make us have to perform brute force forward transitions for each row.
 
> create table num (num numeric(10,2) not null);
> insert into num (num) select * from generate_series(1,20000);
> select sum(num) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 124ms
> select sum(num / 10) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 254ms
> select sum(num / 1) over(order by num rows between current row and unbounded following) from num; -- 108156.917 ms
>
> The divide by 1 case is slow because of that weird 20 trailing zero
> instead of 16 when dividing a numeric by 1 and that causes the inverse
> transition function to return NULL because the scale changes.
>
> I've not tested an unpatched version yet to see how that divide by 1 query
> performs on that but I'll get to that soon.

So without the patch, all three queries should perform simiarly, i.e. take
about 10 seconds, right? If so, the improvement is fantastic!


Well, it's actually 100 seconds, not 10. I tested the worse case performance against an unpatched head and got 107 seconds instead of the 108. So I'm guessing that's pretty good as worse case is not really any worse and the worse case is pretty hard to get to. I guess the results would have to all have a different scale with the biggest scale on the first aggregated values... Reaching that worse case just seems impossible in a real world workload.
 
> I'm thinking that the idea about detecting the numeric range with floating
> point types and performing an inverse transition providing the range has
> not gone beyond some defined danger zone is not material for this patch...
> I think it would be not a great deal of work to code, but the testing involved
> would probably make this patch not possible for 9.4

Yeah, I never imagined that this would happen for 9.4.

> The latest version of the patch is attached.

OK, there are a few more comments

* build_aggregate_fnexprs() should allow NULL to be passed for invtransfn_oid,
  I think. I don't quite like that we construct that even for plain aggregates,
  and avoiding requires just an additional if.

I'm not quite sure what you mean on this. It passes InvalidOid in normal aggregate calls (search for: "InvalidOid, /* invtrans is not needed here */") and only looks up the function in build_aggregate_fnexprs if (OidIsValid(invtransfn_oid)) is true. I'm not sure how this can be improved since that function is used for window aggregates and normal aggregates.
 
* Don't we need to check for volatile function in the filter expression too?


I did manual testing on this before and the volatility test for the aggregate arguments seems to cover this. I didn't look into why but it just did. I've not test this again since your refactoring. I could test this easily before when my numeric case was changing the results because of the dscale problem, I noticed that if I did FILTER(WHERE random() > 0) that the extra trailing zeros would disappear.
The problem now is that it's pretty hard to determine if an inverse transition took place, the only way we can really tell is performance. I'll see if I can invent a new test case for this by creating a user defined aggregate as you described. I'm thinking just append '+' to a string for transitions and '-' to a string for inverse transitions, then just make sure we only have a string of '+'s when doing something like filter(where random() >= 0).

 
* As it stands, I don't think intXand_inv and intXor_inv are worth it, since
  the case where they return non-NULL is awefully slim (only for inputs
  containing only 1 respectively only zeros). We should either track the number
  of zeros and ones per bit, which would allow us to always perform inverse
  transitions, or just drop them.


I did think of this when I wrote them. I thought that the removing 0 case might be quite common and worth it, but I thought the ~0 case would be less common, but I just thought it was weird to do one without the other.
To do more tracking on these it looks like we'd need to change those aggregates to use an state type that is internal and I think the extra tracking would mean looping over a 8, 32 or 64 element array of int64's for each value, I just don't think that would be a winner performance wise since the code that's there is pretty much a handful of CPU cycles. It's probably far more worth it for the bool and/or aggregates. We could just keep track of the values aggregated and the count of values as "true" and return true if those are the same in the case of "AND", then check the true count is > 0 in the case of "OR". I'd feel more strongly to go and do that if I'd actually ever used those aggregates for anything.
 
* Quite a few of the inverse transition functions are marked strict, yet
  contain code to handle NULL inputs. You can just remove that code - the system
  makes sure that strict functions never receive NULL arguments. Affected are,
  AFAICS numeric_accum_inv, numeric_avg_accum_inv, int2_accum_inv,
  int4_accum_inv, int8_accum_inv, int8_avg_accum_inv, int2_sum_inv, int4_sum_inv,
  int8_sum_inv. Not sure that list is exhaustive...


Should be able to get a list from:
select proname,proisstrict from pg_proc where proisstrict = true and oid in(select agginvtransfn from pg_aggregate);

I might not have time for this today though, so if you feel like checking these that would be really helpful.
 
* For any of the new inverse transition functions, I'd be inclined to just
  elog() if they're called directly and not as an aggregate. In particular
  those which check for that anyway, plus the *smaller_inv and *larger_inv
  ones. I don't see why anyone would ever want to call these directly - and
  if we elog() now, we can easy change these functions later, because no external
  code can depend on them. E.g., maybe someone wants to keep the top N elements
  in the MIN/MAX aggregates one day...


Yeah I guess the way it is now may mean we'd need to support legacy functions for ever and a day if we changed the way they worked, but I'm not sure if adding a check to see if it was used in an aggregate function changes that, as a user could be using the built in function in their own user defined aggregate, so there could still be complaints if we removed them from a major version. What would be needed is some way to have functions internally but publish these functions to the user, say only visible from initdb or something. I don't think that's part of this patch though. Maybe just the fact that they're undocumented helps give them more ability to be removed later.
 
* The number of new regression tests seems a bit excessive. I don't think there
  really a policy what to test and what not, but in this case I think it suffices
  if we test the basic machinery, plus the more complex functions. But e.g. most
  of the SUM and AVG aggregates use numeric_accum or numeric_avg_accum internally,
  and the wrapper code basically just does datatype conversion, so testing a few
  cases seems enough there. What I think we *should* test, but don't do currently,
  is whether the core machinery performs the expected calls of the forward and
  reverse transition function. I was thinking about creating an aggregate in the
  regression tests which simply concatenates all the calls into a string, e.g.
  you might get "F:1 F:2 F:3 I:1" if we aggregated 1,2,3 and then removed 1.
  I think that should be possible with an SQL-language forward and inverse
  transfer function, but I haven't tried. I can try, if you want.


I agree that there are quite a lot of tests and I think that's why I took a different approach when it came to all this little *larger_inv and smaller_inv functions, there were just so many!  I thought the aggregate tests would run in the blank of a eye anyway, but perhaps I should consider other things than just processing time. I created most of the aggregate call tests by writing a whole load of queries on an unpatched version then ran the tests and took the output of that as my expected results for my patched copy. These were really useful to check for regression when I was working hard on nodeWindowAgg.c. I'd find it hard to pick and choose what to remove giving that they all test something slightly different, even if it's just a different final function. They did pick up some failures earlier when I forgot to change the strict property on int8_avg_accum_inv. Maybe someone else has an opinion on that the number of tests?

Overall, I think it's really starting to take shape now and the list of things to do are pretty small. I'm really happy to see so many aggregate functions with inverse transition functions now!

Regards

David Rowley
 
best regards,
Florian Pflug


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