How does postgres sort large strings?

[Sergey Burladyan <eshkinkot@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I thought that the sorting values are stored entirely in work_mem, but in fact it works somehow differently.
Can anyone suggest how this works?

For example, I created this 512MB incompressible file and test table:

tr -dcs '[:print:]' '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom | tr -d '"'\' | dd bs=1K count=512K of=asciidump

create unlogged table t1 (v text);
insert into t1 select pg_read_file('asciidump') from generate_series(1, 10);

select pg_column_size(v), octet_length(v) from t1 limit 1;
 pg_column_size | octet_length 
----------------+--------------
      536870912 |    536870912

set work_mem to '64MB';

Now I think that 64MB is not enough to sort such large values and postgres will use temp files,
but in fact it does not.

select temp_files, temp_bytes from pg_stat_database where datname = current_catalog;
 temp_files | temp_bytes 
------------+------------
          0 |          0

explain (analyze,verbose,buffers) select v from t1 order by v;
                                                  QUERY PLAN                                                   
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Sort  (cost=94.38..97.78 rows=1360 width=32) (actual time=6433.138..6433.140 rows=10 loops=1)
   Output: v
   Sort Key: t1.v
   Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 25kB
   Buffers: shared hit=543881 read=679794 written=118012
   ->  Seq Scan on public.t1  (cost=0.00..23.60 rows=1360 width=32) (actual time=0.007..0.009 rows=10 loops=1)
         Output: v
         Buffers: shared hit=1
 Planning Time: 0.035 ms
 Execution Time: 6433.155 ms

> Sort Method: quicksort  Memory: 25kB

select temp_files, temp_bytes from pg_stat_database where datname = current_catalog;
 temp_files | temp_bytes 
------------+------------
          0 |          0

WOW! How does it work?! :-)

-- 
Sergey Burladyan