Re: On-disk bitmap index patch

Ühel kenal päeval, T, 2006-07-25 kell 13:06, kirjutas Tom Lane:
> "Luke Lonergan" <LLonergan(at)greenplum(dot)com> writes:
> > I think we do know, have you reviewed the results in the briefing?
>
> I find those results moderately unconvincing, primarily because they
> are based on choosing the least efficient possible data representation
> (viz char(n)), and thus the btree indexes suffer severe and quite
> artificial bloat.

hmm, maybe this should be fixed in btree then ?

do we really need to store padding blanks in btree ?

> A database schema chosen with even minimal attention
> to PG-specific tuning would probably have btree indexes half the size.
> That wouldn't completely eliminate the performance differential shown,
> but it would bring it down into the ballpark where you have to question
> whether it makes sense to support another index AM.

It still depends on your data volumes. if you spend lots and lots of $
on hardware just to store surplus index bloat, it may be worth it.

Remember, that the bizgres folks develop these things for real-world
datawarehousing, where saving a few (tens or hundreds of) terabytes of
storage and corresponging amount of RAM is a real win.

> The reason I have such high sales resistance is that we've carried the
> hash and rtree AMs for years, hoping that someone would do the work to
> make them actually worth using, with little result.

What would be the use-case for hash indexes ? And what should be done to
make them faster than btree ? I know that they are not wal-logged, but
this is beside the point for DWH apps.

and was'nt the rtree index recently deprecated in favour of GIST
implementation of the same ?

> I don't want any
> more second-class-citizen index AMs, and that's why I'm questioning
> what the scope of applicability of bitmap indexes really is. They need
> to be popular enough that people will be motivated to work on them,
> or they shouldn't be in core.

Is there an easy way to put them into contrib/ for some test period so
that they can become popular among mainstream postgresql users ?

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