Hacker News Reader

Great paper. Is that the fastest sort right now?

There is no such thing as the fastest sorting algorithm.

Sorting is a landscape of hundreds of algorithms, with various details and assumptions.

Even the definition of the sorting task can be different - depending on what, how, and why you are going to sort.

I've covered it in my presentation here: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/bdtc_2019/#20

Nice slides! Of course, I should have asked whether it's on the pareto frontier. By the way, the author of pdqsort has a new sorting algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y3IK1l6PI4

The referenced presentation is an unusually good talk on optimization in DBMS. I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. Among other tricks ClickHouse uses adaptive optimization to switch approaches during query execution. [0] It's interesting to contrast this to the costs of upfront optimization.

[0] https://presentations.clickhouse.com/bdtc_2019/#34

Reply on news.ycombinator.com