Re: Adding skip scan (including MDAM style range skip scan) to nbtree

On Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 9:53 AM Natalya Aksman <natalya(at)tigerdata(dot)com> wrote:
> Our Timescaledb extension has scenarios changing ">" quals to "=" and back on rescan and it breaks when so->Skipscan needs to be reset from true to false.

But the amrescan docs say:

"In practice the restart feature is used when a new outer tuple is
selected by a nested-loop join and so a new key comparison value is
needed, but the scan key structure remains the same" [1].

I don't understand why it is that our not resetting the so->Skipscan
flag within btrescan has any particular significance to Timescaledb,
relative to all of the other fields that are supposed to be set by
_bt_preprocess_keys. What is the actual failure you see? Is it an
assertion failure within _bt_readpage/_bt_checkkeys?

Note that btrescan *does* set "so->numberOfKeys = 0", which will make
the next call to _bt_preprocess_keys (from _bt_first) perform
preprocessing from scratch. This should set so->Skipscan from scratch
on each rescan (along with every other field set by preprocessing). It
seems like that should work for you (in spite of the fact that you're
doing something that seems at odds with the index AM API).

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/index-functions.html
--
Peter Geoghegan