Sorting of integers and floats 23% faster in PostgreSQL 9.2 (long explanation)

Peter is awesome and is also primarily responsible for a bunch of power consumption improvements: <a href="http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2012/01/power-consumption-in-postgres-92.html" rel="nofollow">http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2012/01/power-consumption-in-...</a>

PostgreSQL should really be using a radix sort for these data types, not a quick sort (however "optimized").

C++'s template-based sorting mechanisms allow for the same optimization without manually special-casing anything. (The compiler "integrates everything", to quote the author, out of the box.) C++ port of Postgresql, anyone?