Re: WIP: BRIN multi-range indexes

Hi,

while running some benchmarks to see if the first two patches cause any
regressions, I found a bug in 0002 which reworks the NULL handling. The
code failed to eliminate ranges early using the IS NULL scan keys,
resulting in expensive recheck. The attached version fixes that.

I also noticed that some of the queries seem to be slightly slower, most
likely due to bringetbitmap having to split the scan keys per attribute,
which also requires some allocations etc. The regression is fairly small
might be just noise (less than 2-3% in most cases), but it seems just
allocating everything in a single chunk eliminates most of it - this is
what the new 0003 patch does.

OTOH the rework also helps in other cases - I've measured ~2-3% speedups
for cases where moving the IS NULL handling to bringetbitmap eliminates
calls to the consistent function (e.g. IS NULL queries on columns with
no NULL values).

These results seems very dependent on the hardware (especially CPU),
though, and the differences are pretty small in general (1-2%).

regards

--
Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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