Fix multi-column ColumnIndex rebuild ordering via per-column radix sort + merge

[yihozhang]

Problem

The multi-column ColumnIndex rebuild (the rebuild_index covering all of a table's rebuildable value columns) produced incorrect subsets. It collected (value, row_id) pairs column-major — all of column 0's pairs, then column 1's, etc. — and sorted them only by value. Within a single value's group the rows then came out as column 0's rows (RowId-ascending) followed by column 1's rows (RowId-ascending), i.e. not globally RowId-ascending.

That violates the invariant that each key's subset is built from rows in ascending RowId order (the contract add_row_sorted and the offset consumers rely on), so a value present in more than one column could get a subset with out-of-order offsets. The single-column path was unaffected because its scan order is already RowId-ascending.

Solution

Rebuild each key's subset from a properly (Value, RowId)-sorted, de-duplicated pair list:

1. Collect each column into its own contiguous block (still RowId-ascending from scan order).
2. Value-only radix sort each block. Because the sort is stable and each block arrives RowId-ascending, the block ends up ordered by (Value, RowId) — with no RowId passes.
3. Balanced tournament two-way merge of the sorted blocks, dropping duplicate pairs (a value appearing in several of a row's columns). Dedup composes through the merge tree since merging two deduped sorted runs leaves any shared pair adjacent.

Single- and multi-column rebuilds now share one code path; the previous global-sort-plus-per-value-group-re-sort is gone.

Why this shape

• No single-column overhead. Fixing ordering by adding RowId passes to the shared radix sort regressed the (hot) single-column path ~1–2.6%, because those passes are wasted work when pairs already arrive RowId-ordered. Sorting per-column and merging keeps the single-column case at its original cost.
• O(n log k) merge. A left-fold that merges one growing accumulator against each block in turn is O(n*k) in the column count k (the accumulator is re-copied every step). The balanced tournament merge halves the run count each round → O(n log k), which matters for wide tables. For the common two-column case it is the same single merge.

Performance

Benchmarked with scripts/bench.py against the prior per-group-sort implementation across the standard suite (conv1d, luminal-llama, python_array, cykjson, eggcc-extraction). Net change is within the measurement noise floor (≈ ±1% run-to-run on these inputs), with no consistent regression — the single-column hot path is unchanged and eggcc/cykjson trend slightly faster. The O(n log k) merge improvement is asymptotic and applies to wide multi-column tables, which the current benchmark suite does not exercise.

Testing

• New regression test multi_column_column_index_rebuild_orders_each_value_by_row asserts each value's subset matches RowId-ascending table scan order after rebuilds.
• All core-relations unit tests and the full egglog integration suite (723 tests) pass; cargo fmt --check and clippy -D warnings clean.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[codspeed-hq]

Merging this PR will not alter performance

✅ 29 untouched benchmarks
⏩ 219 skipped benchmarks¹

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_{Comparing yihozhang-better-index-order-fix (a3ace91) with main (7d102db)}

Footnotes

1. 219 benchmarks were skipped, so the baseline results were used instead. If they were deleted from the codebase, click here and archive them to remove them from the performance reports. ↩

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 86.59%. Comparing base (57108da) to head (a3ace91).
⚠️ Report is 68 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #914      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   87.17%   86.59%   -0.59%     
==========================================
  Files          88       89       +1     
  Lines       26106    26872     +766     
==========================================
+ Hits        22759    23269     +510     
- Misses       3347     3603     +256     

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[oflatt]

Does this fix #911 ? Or different issue?

[saulshanabrook]

This I believe is instead of #899?