The Sortable interface: Teaching every column type to sort itself
Blog post from Axiom
The text discusses a project that significantly improved sorting performance in a columnar database by implementing a Sortable interface, allowing each column type to exploit its unique structure with tailored algorithms. Unlike Go's general-purpose sorting, which ignores the data's structure, this approach led to speedups between 2x and 26x depending on the column type, by replacing the traditional comparison-based sort with more efficient methods like counting sort for bounded-value columns, the Dutch National Flag algorithm for Boolean columns, and radix sort for numeric data. The project emphasized the power of understanding data structure, showing that leveraging specific characteristics like bounded cardinality and minimizing allocations can greatly enhance sorting efficiency. The Sortable interface also facilitated independent optimization of multiple sorting implementations, allowing for improved performance without altering the query engine, and suggesting potential future advancements by shifting client-side operations to the server for faster results.
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