## What changes were proposed in this pull request?
This adds support for radix sort of nullable long fields. When a sort field is null and radix sort is enabled, we keep nulls in a separate region of the sort buffer so that radix sort does not need to deal with them. This also has performance benefits when sorting smaller integer types, since the current representation of nulls in two's complement (Long.MIN_VALUE) otherwise forces a full-width radix sort.
This strategy for nulls does mean the sort is no longer stable. cc davies
## How was this patch tested?
Existing randomized sort tests for correctness. I also tested some TPCDS queries and there does not seem to be any significant regression for non-null sorts.
Some test queries (best of 5 runs each).
Before change:
scala> val start = System.nanoTime; spark.range(5000000).selectExpr("if(id > 5, cast(hash(id) as long), NULL) as h").coalesce(1).orderBy("h").collect(); (System.nanoTime - start) / 1e6
start: Long = 3190437233227987
res3: Double = 4716.471091
After change:
scala> val start = System.nanoTime; spark.range(5000000).selectExpr("if(id > 5, cast(hash(id) as long), NULL) as h").coalesce(1).orderBy("h").collect(); (System.nanoTime - start) / 1e6
start: Long = 3190367870952791
res4: Double = 2981.143045
Author: Eric Liang <ekl@databricks.com>
Closes#13161 from ericl/sc-2998.
c06c58bbbb