pgbench: Function to generate random permutations.
authorDean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>
Tue, 6 Apr 2021 10:50:42 +0000 (11:50 +0100)
committerDean Rasheed <dean.a.rasheed@gmail.com>
Tue, 6 Apr 2021 10:50:42 +0000 (11:50 +0100)
commit6b258e3d688db14aadb58dde2a72939362310684
treeb1f740242a8998a1992065f603953e848680d89b
parenta8af856d3257138590788e40eb84049def147acf
pgbench: Function to generate random permutations.

This adds a new function, permute(), that generates pseudorandom
permutations of arbitrary sizes. This can be used to randomly shuffle
a set of values to remove unwanted correlations. For example,
permuting the output from a non-uniform random distribution so that
all the most common values aren't collocated, allowing more realistic
tests to be performed.

Formerly, hash() was recommended for this purpose, but that suffers
from collisions that might alter the distribution, so recommend
permute() for this purpose instead.

Fabien Coelho and Hironobu Suzuki, with additional hacking be me.
Reviewed by Thomas Munro, Alvaro Herrera and Muhammad Usama.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/alpine.DEB.2.21.1807280944370.5142@lancre
doc/src/sgml/ref/pgbench.sgml
src/bin/pgbench/exprparse.y
src/bin/pgbench/pgbench.c
src/bin/pgbench/pgbench.h
src/bin/pgbench/t/001_pgbench_with_server.pl
src/bin/pgbench/t/002_pgbench_no_server.pl