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Tom Lane 1dc5ebc907 Support "expanded" objects, particularly arrays, for better performance.
This patch introduces the ability for complex datatypes to have an
in-memory representation that is different from their on-disk format.
On-disk formats are typically optimized for minimal size, and in any case
they can't contain pointers, so they are often not well-suited for
computation.  Now a datatype can invent an "expanded" in-memory format
that is better suited for its operations, and then pass that around among
the C functions that operate on the datatype.  There are also provisions
(rudimentary as yet) to allow an expanded object to be modified in-place
under suitable conditions, so that operations like assignment to an element
of an array need not involve copying the entire array.

The initial application for this feature is arrays, but it is not hard
to foresee using it for other container types like JSON, XML and hstore.
I have hopes that it will be useful to PostGIS as well.

In this initial implementation, a few heuristics have been hard-wired
into plpgsql to improve performance for arrays that are stored in
plpgsql variables.  We would like to generalize those hacks so that
other datatypes can obtain similar improvements, but figuring out some
appropriate APIs is left as a task for future work.  (The heuristics
themselves are probably not optimal yet, either, as they sometimes
force expansion of arrays that would be better left alone.)

Preliminary performance testing shows impressive speed gains for plpgsql
functions that do element-by-element access or update of large arrays.
There are other cases that get a little slower, as a result of added array
format conversions; but we can hope to improve anything that's annoyingly
bad.  In any case most applications should see a net win.

Tom Lane, reviewed by Andres Freund
2015-05-14 12:08:49 -04:00
config fix escaping of brackets for m4 broken in b6b2149e48 2015-05-03 09:37:15 -04:00
contrib Further fixes for the buildfarm for pg_audit 2015-05-14 11:55:36 -04:00
doc Support "expanded" objects, particularly arrays, for better performance. 2015-05-14 12:08:49 -04:00
src Support "expanded" objects, particularly arrays, for better performance. 2015-05-14 12:08:49 -04:00
.dir-locals.el emacs: Set indent-tabs-mode in perl-mode 2015-04-12 23:53:23 -04:00
.gitattributes Add functions for dealing with PGP armor header lines to pgcrypto. 2014-10-01 16:03:39 +03:00
.gitignore Improve speed of make check-world 2015-04-23 08:59:52 -04:00
aclocal.m4
configure fix escaping of brackets for m4 broken in b6b2149e48 2015-05-03 09:37:15 -04:00
configure.in Windows also needs an override of the shared libpython detection 2015-05-02 13:23:16 -04:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2015 2015-01-06 11:43:47 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Fix distclean/maintainer-clean targets to remove top-level tmp_install dir. 2015-05-13 18:48:05 -04:00
HISTORY Improve text of stub HISTORY file. 2014-02-12 18:16:17 -05:00
Makefile
README Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:04 -05:00
README.git Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:04 -05:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.