EXPLAIN EXTENDED

In my previous article I presented a proposal to add sargability of monotonic functions into the SQL engines.

In a nutshell: a monotonic function is a function that preserves the order of the argument so that it gives the larger results for the larger values of the argument. It is easy to prove that a B-tree with each key replaced by the result of the function will remain the valid B-Tree and hence can be used to search for ranges of function results just like it is used to search for ranges of values.

With a little effort, a B-Tree can also be used to search for the ranges of piecewise monotonic functions: those whose domain can be split into a number of continuous pieces with the function being monotonic within each piece (but it may be not monotonic and even not continuous across the pieces).

In this article, I'll demonstrate the algorithm to do that (implemented in pure SQL on PostgreSQL).

I will show how the performance of simple query

SELECT  *
FROM    t_sine
WHERE   SIN(value) BETWEEN 0.1234 AND 0.1235

could be improved if the sargability of monotonic functions had been implemented in the optimizer.
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