On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 07:08:51PM -0700, David Wheeler wrote:
> On May 16, 2006, at 18:29, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> 
> >>Yes, but there are definitely programming cases where memoization/ 
> >>caching definitely helps. And it's easy to tell for a given  
> >>function whether or not it really helps by simply trying it with  
> >>CACHED and without.
> >>Would this be a simple thing to implement?
> >
> >It's called a "table" :)
> 
>   http://www.justatheory.com/computers/databases/postgresql/ 
> higher_order_plpgsql.html
> 
> Yes, I know. :-P But it'd be easier to have a CACHED keyword, of course.

Rather than worrying about a generic form of memoization, what would be
extremely valuable would be to improve detection of the same function
being used multiple times in a query, ie:

SELECT moo(x), moo(x)/2 FROM table;

AFAIK PostgreSQL will currently execute moo(x) twice. Even if it knows
how to optimize this brain-dead example, I think there are other
examples it can't optimize right now. Having a much simpler memoization
scheme that only works on a tuple-by-tuple basis would probably
eliminate a lot of those (It wouldn't work for any executor node that
has to read it's entire input before returning anything, though, such as
sort).
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

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