Re: Partial index on date column

"Christopher Kings-Lynne" <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> Partial-index condition matching is a horribly difficult problem in
>> general, and we only attempt a few limited cases right now.

> Is it worth hard-coding in the IS NOT NULL case?

Damifino. I have no fundamental objection to doing so --- but I'd want
to see some sort of cost-benefit argument showing that it wouldn't be
a net loss on average. It's real easy to blow a few cycles on every
query looking for cases that don't show up often enough to justify the
distributed cost :-(.

It helps a lot if you can put in short-circuits that prevent the
matching work from being done on simple queries. For example, the
parser/rewriter/planner take care to keep track of whether a query
contains any sub-SELECTs, and if you look in the planner you will notice
quite a lot of work that gets short-circuited when there aren't any.
I'm not sure how to make a short-circuit test for this case, however.

regards, tom lane