Daniel,

I personally would put it the other way around. The scalar version should in principle always be there, as it guarantees that every query works. 

Then you look at optimizing performance. 
1) leave it as is and let it wrap in a MAL loop
2) If it is a C function, it will likely be wrapped in a C loop by manifold. 
3) For best performance, you may want to implement the loop yourself with a BAT implementation.

When doing what depends on the nature of the function. 
If every scalar call requires costly initialisations or allocations, then the first two options can be very slow. In that case you want to choose option 3 and do all initialisations and allocations outside the loop.
Your function is essentially a tight loop around a strstr() call, so in principle I don't expect much difference between 2) and 3).

There is a catch though. You have a boolean parameter to control casessensitive.
So in case of a BAT implementation, you have 3 columns in input (*also for the possibly constant boolean column*) and your loop looks like (pseudocode):

loop(string,pattern,cs)
  if (cs)
    strstr(sring,pattern);
  else
    strcasestr(string,pattern)

Conditions inside loops are not your best friends.
Given that in most use cases your boolean column will be constant (either all true or all false), you can optimize this by doing:

if (cs.sorted && cs.revsorted) /* cs is constant */ {
  if (cs[0]) {
    loop(string,pattern,cs)
      strstr(sring,pattern);
  } else {
    loop(string,pattern,cs)
      strcasestr(string,pattern)
  }
} else { /* cs not constant, check at every tuple */
  loop(string,pattern,cs)
    if (cs)
      strstr(sring,pattern);
    else
      strcasestr(string,pattern)
}

The point here is that option 3) is the only one that allows you to play this way.
I normally use option 3) whenever I see a chance to get some work out of the loop. In all other cases there is no real need.

> BAT operations are faster for most of the operations, but when formulas include multiple conditional evaluations, the parallelism and vectorization advantage is clearly lost and loop × scalar might be the winner, don't you think?

Notice that when you manage to go back to a very tight loop, you got your vectorization opportunities back.

As for parallelism opportunities, I doubt that option 2) would allow any. Parallelism in MonetDB is handled at MAL level. So option 1), if any, would be your best shot for this. Especially if your function can be written in SQL or MAL (these are rare), and they are simple enough to be inlined.

Best regards,
Roberto

On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 at 08:06, Daniel Zvinca <daniel.zvinca@logbis.com> wrote:
Your last reply, Roberto, makes me wonder if it would be an idea to implement a scalar capi as well (for now is bat only). Then for sure the loop will be entirely done in C.

BAT operations are faster for most of the operations, but when formulas include multiple conditional evaluations, the parallelism and vectorization advantage is clearly lost and loop × scalar might be the winner, don't you think?




On Mon, Oct 7, 2019, 18:39 Roberto Cornacchia <roberto.cornacchia@gmail.com> wrote:
Just to mention, you can also force a tuple-at-the-time evaluation in pure SQL:

-- BEGIN
declare cs boolean;
set cs=true;

START TRANSACTION;

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION mycontains(s STRING, p STRING, casesensitive boolean)
RETURNS BOOLEAN
BEGIN
  IF casesensitive
  THEN RETURN SELECT s like '%'||p||'%';
  ELSE RETURN SELECT s ilike '%'||p||'%';
  END IF;
END;

CREATE TABLE t(s STRING);
INSERT INTO t VALUES ('apple'),('pear'),('banana'),('orange');

explain select * from t where mycontains(s,'an',cs);;
-- END

If you look at this explain, you'll see it makes a loop that calls the mycontains() function. This does avoid evaluating both branches. However the explicit interpreted loop won't make it very fast, perhaps see on your data. (Note: when the function is simpler, the loop is actually done in C)


On Mon, 7 Oct 2019 at 16:53, Daniel Zvinca <daniel.zvinca@logbis.com> wrote:
I wasn't sure if this question should be posted here or on regular user list, considering the way statements are generated and possible connections with internal functionality.

I understand the explanations. I should have checked the explain feature myself. I think that I expected the optimizer to notice a constant expression and evaluate it before choosing which real columnar operation needs to be performed (obviously only one). Instead all members are evaluated, the whole explain statement is self-explanatory, indeed. (a delayed bat evaluation mechanism would have helped, I guess, for this case)

I use capi intensively, but for string columns the capi memory management can be a serious limitation for large sets.

Anyway, your answer is very helpful for me, it makes me consider adjusting my approach from a straight translation into one SQL statement into using an intermediary language that would build the optimal statement instead of stretching the SQL to get what I need.

Thank you,

On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 4:44 PM Sjoerd Mullender <sjoerd@monetdb.org> wrote:
On 07/10/2019 14.33, Roberto Cornacchia wrote:
> Hi Daniel,

[...]

> In this case, you would get better performance by implementing a BAT
> function (not a function that works on a single value, but on a column
> of values). 
> You would write that in C using the GDK api
> (https://www.monetdb.org/Documentation/Cookbooks/SQLrecipes/UserDefinedFunction),
> and evaluate the condition i the loop, per value.
> However, this requires you to recompile MonetDB to include your new
> function.

Recompilation of MonetDB should not be necessary.  See [1].

[1] https://www.monetdb.org/hg/MonetDB-extend/

--
Sjoerd Mullender

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