Re: proposal for smaller indexes on index-ordered tables

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 4:34 PM, Jeffrey Baker <jwbaker(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Supposing the table is generally or strictly ordered by the column to be
> indexed, it would be more compact if the index stored ranges of tuples.
> Instead of storing the TID of every tuple with that value, the index would
> store a first and last TID, between which all tuples have the value.

There are several databases which implement this idea. Unfortunately,
Postgres does not yet ensure that indexed tables remain indexed. As
such, an index such as this would soon be ineffective. IIRC, Heikki
has done some work on keeping clustered tables clustered, but it
hasn't yet made it into core.

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Jonah H. Harris, Sr. Software Architect | phone: 732.331.1324
EnterpriseDB Corporation | fax: 732.331.1301
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