Re: WARM and indirect indexes

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 04:38:10PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> More broadly, I don't share Bruce's negativity about indirect indexes.
> My estimate of what needs to be done for them to be really useful is -
> I think - higher than your estimate of what needs to be done, but I
> think the concept is great. I also think that some of the concepts -
> like allowing the tuple pointers to have widths other than 6 byes -
> could turn out to be a good foundation for global indexes in the
> future. In fact, it might be considerably easier to make an indirect
> index span a partitioning hierarchy than it would be to do the same
> for a regular index. But regardless of that, the feature is good for
> what it offers today.

I am worried that indirect indexes might have such limited usefulness
with a well-designed WARM feature that the syntax/feature would be
useless for 99% of users. In talking to Alexander Korotkov, he
mentioned that indirect indexes could be used for global/cross-partition
indexes, and for index-organized tables (heap and index together in a
single file). This would greatly expand the usefulness of indirect
indexes and would be exciting.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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