Re: UUID v1 optimizations...

On 25/05/2019 23:54, Tom Lane wrote:
> Ancoron Luciferis <ancoron.luciferis@googlemail.com> writes:
>> On 25/05/2019 16:57, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> (4) it in fact *wouldn't* do anything useful, because we'd still have
>>> to sort UUIDs in the same order as today, meaning that btree index behavior
>>> would remain the same as before.  Plus UUID comparison would get a lot
>>> more complicated and slower than it is now.
> 
>> I get your first sentence, but not your second. I know that when
>> changing the internal byte order we'd have to completed re-compute
>> everything on-disk (from table to index data), but why would the sorting
>> in the index have to be the same?
> 
> Because we aren't going to change the existing sort order of UUIDs.
> We have no idea what applications might be dependent on that.
> 
> As Vitalii correctly pointed out, your beef is not with the physical
> storage of UUIDs anyway: you just wish they'd sort differently, since
> that is what determines the behavior of a btree index.  But we aren't
> going to change the sort ordering because that's an even bigger
> compatibility break than changing the physical storage; it'd affect
> application-visible semantics.
> 
> What you might want to think about is creating a function that maps
> UUIDs into an ordering that makes sense to you, and then creating
> a unique index over that function instead of the raw UUIDs.  That
> would give the results you want without having to negotiate with the
> rest of the world about whether it's okay to change the semantics
> of type uuid.
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 

I understand. Point taken, I really didn't think about someone could
depend on an index order of a (pretty random) UUID.

The whole point of me starting this discussion was about performance in
multiple areas, but INSERT performance was really becoming an issue for
us apart from the index bloat, which was way higher than just the 30% at
several occasions (including out-of-disk-space in the early days), apart
from the fact that the index was regularly dismissed due to it not being
in memory. In that sense, just creating additional indexes with
functions doesn't really solve the core issues that we had.

Not to mention the performance of VACUUM, among other things.

So, even we currently "solved" a lot of these issues at the application
level, we now have UUID's that look like v1 UUID's but in fact will not
be readable (in the representation as returned by PostgreSQL) by any
other application that doesn't know our specific implementation. This
forces us to hack other tools written in other languages that would
otherwise understand and handle regular v1 UUID's as well.

I should add that the tests I have made where all running on dedicated
SSD's, one for the table data, one for the indexes and one for the WAL.
If those where running against the same disks the difference would
probably be much higher during writes.

I'll think about creating an extension to provide a custom data type
instead. So nobody would be at risk and anyone would decide explicitly
for it with all consequences.

Thank you for your time and precious input. :)


Cheers,

    Ancoron