Re: On-disk bitmap index patch

Ühel kenal päeval, P, 2006-07-23 kell 20:25, kirjutas Tom Lane:
> Gavin Sherry <swm(at)linuxworld(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> > On Sun, 23 Jul 2006, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> However, the main problem I've got with this is that a new index AM is a
> >> pretty large burden, and no one's made the slightest effort to sell
> >> pghackers on taking this on.
>
> > For low cardinality sets, bitmaps greatly out perform btree.
>
> If the column is sufficiently low cardinality, you might as well just do
> a seqscan --- you'll be hitting most of the heap's pages anyway. I'm
> still waiting to be convinced that there's a sweet spot wide enough to
> justify supporting another index AM. (I'm also wondering whether this
> doesn't overlap the use-case for GIN.)

IIRC they quoted the cardinality of 10000 as something that is still
faster than btree for several usecases.

And also for AND-s of several indexes, where indexes are BIG, your btree
indexes may be almost as big as tables but the resulting set of pages is
small.

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