Re: Updated bitmap index patch

Gavin Sherry wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Attached is an updated bitmap index patch. It contains bug fixes, API
> changes, binary changes (page identifier to distinguish it from other
> indexes) and has been brought up to HEAD.
>

I have applied this to todays HEAD performed some quick tests - looks
good! I have to re-create a TPC-H dataset to test one of the previous
bugs, so I'll probably look at that tomorrow or so.

> I worked on a few approaches to VACUUM, none very satisfactory. The
> problem is, breaking a compressed word representing matches can have
> serious consequences -- at the least, creation of new words, at the worst,
> creation of a new page. If a lot of this were to happen, REINDEX would be
> much more efficient (this is what earlier patches did).
>
> One approach I looked at was modifying the existing read API to be able to
> do something like "kill prior tuple". This, I think, made the API quite
> complex and it was hard to implement, since the existing mechanism
> decompresses words on the fly and it would be hard to identify which TID
> is no longer a match. So, I dropped this idea pretty quickly.
>
> The second approach is to just manually traverse each vector and change
> matches to non-matches where necessary. The complexity then is in managing
> the consequences of breaking compressed words, doing WAL (efficiently) and
> calculating free space. I've only partially implemented this approach. At
> this stage, I don't have time to finish it due to other commitments.
>

The second approach seems like better the way to go (as far as I
understand the issues...). How much work is remaining on this? - not
sure that I'll have time to look at it either ... but may as well know
the size to the job :-) !

Cheers

Mark