Introduce CompactAttribute array in TupleDesc

The new compact_attrs array stores a few select fields from
FormData_pg_attribute in a more compact way, using only 16 bytes per
column instead of the 104 bytes that FormData_pg_attribute uses.  Using
CompactAttribute allows performance-critical operations such as tuple
deformation to be performed without looking at the FormData_pg_attribute
element in TupleDesc which means fewer cacheline accesses.  With this
change, NAMEDATALEN could be increased with a much smaller negative impact
on performance.

For some workloads, tuple deformation can be the most CPU intensive part
of processing the query.  Some testing with 16 columns on a table
where the first column is variable length showed around a 10% increase in
transactions per second for an OLAP type query performing aggregation on
the 16th column.  However, in certain cases, the increases were much
higher, up to ~25% on one AMD Zen4 machine.

This also makes pg_attribute.attcacheoff redundant.  A follow-on commit
will remove it, thus shrinking the FormData_pg_attribute struct by 4
bytes.

Author: David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvrBztXP3yx=NKNmo3xwFAFhEdyPnvrDg3=M0RhDs+4vYw@mail.gmail.com
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund, Victor Yegorov

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/access/spgist/spgutils.c b/src/backend/access/spgist/spgutils.c
index e93d9869b27..da858182173 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/spgist/spgutils.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/spgist/spgutils.c
@@ -331,7 +331,9 @@ getSpGistTupleDesc(Relation index, SpGistTypeDesc *keyType)
 		att->attcollation = InvalidOid;
 		/* In case we changed typlen, we'd better reset following offsets */
 		for (int i = spgFirstIncludeColumn; i < outTupDesc->natts; i++)
-			TupleDescAttr(outTupDesc, i)->attcacheoff = -1;
+			TupleDescCompactAttr(outTupDesc, i)->attcacheoff = -1;
+
+		populate_compact_attribute(outTupDesc, spgKeyColumn);
 	}
 	return outTupDesc;
 }