as well as the hash function (formerly the comparison function was hardwired
as memcmp()). This makes it possible to eliminate the special-purpose
hashtable management code in execGrouping.c in favor of using dynahash to
manage tuple hashtables; which is a win because dynahash knows how to expand
a hashtable when the original size estimate was too small, whereas the
special-purpose code was too stupid to do that. (See recent gripe from
Stephan Szabo about poor performance when hash table size estimate is way
off.) Free side benefit: when using string_hash, the default comparison
function is now strncmp() instead of memcmp(). This should eliminate some
part of the overhead associated with larger NAMEDATALEN values.
specific hash functions used by hash indexes, rather than the old
not-datatype-aware ComputeHashFunc routine. This makes it safe to do
hash joining on several datatypes that previously couldn't use hashing.
The sets of datatypes that are hash indexable and hash joinable are now
exactly the same, whereas before each had some that weren't in the other.
