Re: Proposal for Null Bitmap Optimization(for Trailing NULLs)

From: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>
Cc: Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Gokulakannan Somasundaram <gokul007(at)gmail(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers list <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Proposal for Null Bitmap Optimization(for Trailing NULLs)
Date: 2007-12-17 14:12:57
Message-ID: 1197900777.12912.110.camel@ebony.site
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On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 08:47 -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> This strikes me as such a corner case that it's likely not to be worth it.
>
> If you really want to save space along these lines, one better place to
> start might be mutable with column ordering - see
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-12/msg00983.php . That
> would mean that we would be able to move nullable columns physically to
> the tail which in turn might help this suggestion have more effect.

Could be a good idea.

Currently on a 64-bit system we occupy 23 bytes for row header, so any
table with more than 8 columns will cause the null bitmap to overflow
and for us to use another 8 bytes.

OP's idea could avoid that in many cases, so the saving isn't 1 byte it
is fairly frequently going to be an 8 byte saving.

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com

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