Re: To Do wiki

On 10.04.2012 03:32, Jeff Janes wrote:
> The To Do wiki says not to add things to the page with discussing here.
>
> So here are some things to discuss. Assuming the discussion is a
> brief yup or nope, it seems to make sense to lump them into one email:
>
> Vacuuming a table with a large GIN index is painfully slow, because
> the index is vacuumed in logical order not physical order. Is making
> a vacuum in physical order a to-do? Does this belong to vacuuming, or
> to GIN indexing? Looking at the complexity of how this was done for
> btree index, I would say this is far from easy. I wonder if there is
> an easier way that is still good enough, for example every time you
> split a page, check to see if a vacuum is in the index, and if so only
> move tuples physically rightward. If the table is so active that
> there is essentially always a vacuum in the index, this could lead to
> bloat. But if the table is that large and active, under the current
> non-physical order the vacuum would likely take approximately forever
> to finish and so the bloat would be just as bad under that existing
> system.

Yup, seems like a todo. It doesn't sound like a good idea to force
tuples to be moved right when a vacuum is in progress, that could lead
to bloating, but it should be feasible to implement the same
cycleid-mechanism in gin that we did in b-tree.

> "Speed up COUNT(*)" is marked as done. While index-only-scans should
> speed this up in certain cases, it is nothing compared to the speed up
> that could be obtained by "use a fixed row count and a +/- count to
> follow MVCC visibility rules", and that speed-up is the one people
> used to MyISAM are expecting. We might not want to actually implement
> the fixed row count +/- MVCC count idea, but we probably shouldn't
> mark the whole thing as done because just one approach to it was
> implemented.

I think the way we'd speed up COUNT(*) further would be to implement
materialized views. Then you could define a materialized view on
COUNT(*), and essentially get a row counter similar to MyISAM. I think
it's fair to mark this as done.

> sort_support was implemented for plain tuple sorting only, To Do is
> extend to index-creation sorts (item 2 from message
> <1698(dot)1323222387(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>)

Index-creation sorts are already handled, Tom is referring to using the
new comparator API for index searches in that email. The change would go
to _bt_compare().

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com