(vs. at the end of a normal sort). This ensures that explicit sorts
yield the same ordering as a btree index scan. To be really sure that
that equivalence holds, we use the btree entries in pg_amop to decide
whether we are looking at a '<' or '>' operator. For a sort operator
that has no btree association, we put the nulls at the front if the
operator is named '>' ... pretty grotty, but it does the right thing in
simple ASC and DESC cases, and at least there's no possibility of getting
a different answer depending on the plan type chosen.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
a generalized module 'tuplesort.c' that can sort either HeapTuples or
IndexTuples, and is not tied to execution of a Sort node. Clean up
memory leakages in sorting, and replace nbtsort.c's private implementation
of mergesorting with calls to tuplesort.c.
