I have taken a look at this discussion, at the code and I am confused how we choose tuple table slot (TTS) type in PG. May be you can clarify this topic or me.
1. Brief intro. There are four types of TTS. Plan tree «leaves»: - buffer heap (produced by index and table scans, has system columns and keeps shared buffer pins) - heap (produced by FDW: has system columns, but doesn’t keep any pins) - minimal (produced by values and materializations nodes like sort, agg, etc.) Plan «branches»: - virtual (keeps datum references to the columns of the tuples in the child nodes) Virtual TTS is cheeper to copy among the plan (as we copy datum references), but more expensive to materialize (we have to construct a tuple from pieces). Leaves are cheeper to materialize (as we make a memcmp under hood), but very expensive to copy (we copy the value, not the datum reference). 2. If we take a look at the materialize nodes in the plan, they produce different result TTS. - Outer child TTS type: gater, gather merge, lock rows, limit; - Minimal: material, sort, incremental sort, memoize, unique, hash, setup (can be heap as well); - Virtual: group, agg, window agg. From my point of view, the materialization node should preserve the incoming TTS type. For the sort node (that materializes incoming tuples as minimal) it is ok to output minimal result as well. Looks that unique should use the outer child’d TTS (instead of hardcoded minimal). But can anyone explain me why do group, agg and window agg return the virtual instead of the same TTS type as outer child has? Do we expect that the parent node exists and requires exactly virtual tuples (but what if the parent node is sort and benefits from minimal TTS)? So, it looks like we need to take a look not only at the unique, but also inspect all the materialization nodes.
