On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Elefterios Stamatogiannakis
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Our main test case is TPCH, a standard DB benchmark. The "lineitem" table of
> TPCH contains 16 columns, which for 10M rows would require 160M xColumn
> callbacks, to pass it through the virtual table API. These callbacks are
> very expensive, especially when at the other end sits a VM (CPython or PyPy)
> handling them.
>
Ok, not stating that the performance improvment is impossible, I will
explain why I'm a little sceptical about it.
For every bulk insert we have a theoretical maxiumum we'd all glad to
see sqlite would perform with - the speed of simple file copying.
Sqlite can't be faster than that, but to be on par is a good goal.
This is not possible when an insert means also modification of other
parts of the file, for example when there's an index involved. But
let's forget about it. Finally when new data is added, sqlite should
write a number of database pages, the cost of this part is absolutely
in the hands of the media (driver) and OS (driver). But for every
database page write there's also price to pay in CPU units, for many
actions sqlite should do before actual value is translated from what
the developer provided to what actually appears on disk.
The illustration of the CPU price is the following example
CREATE TABLE t(Value)
on my ssd drive mulitply inserts (thousands)
insert into t (Value) values ('123456689.... // this string
contains many symbols, for example 1024)
performed with the speed
30 MB/Sec
but the query
insert into t (Value) values (100000) // this is a small integer value
only
3 Mb/Sec
Both shows almost full cpu load. Why such difference? Because with
latter query the system can do more than 30 MB of writes in 1 second,
but it should wait for sqlite spending 10 seconds in preparations.
The former is better because CPU cost of passing a large text value to
sqlite is comparatively low comparing to the time spent in I/O in
writing this on disk.
So CPU price to pay isn't avoidable and notice that in example this is
not virtual table API, this is bind API. I suppose that the price we
pay for CPU spent in virtual table API is on par with an average price
payed in sqlite as a whole. This means that if I transfom the avove
queries into inserts from virtual tables, the final speed difference
will be similar. And this also means that for your comparision tests
(when you get x3 difference), the CPU price sqlite pays inside bind
api and in its code wrapping xColumn call is probably similar. The
rest is the share your code pays.
Well, I know that there are differences in CPU architectures and
probably there are platform where compiled code for bind api and
virtual tables api behaves a little differently making the costs more
diffrent. But imagine that hard task of fine tuning and refactoring
just to get a noticeable difference for a particular platform.
Max
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