Re: Fast index build vs. PITR

On Mon, 31 May 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

[snip]

> I thought for a little bit about a magic "reconstruct the index" WAL
> entry that would invoke the index build procedure in toto, but that
> doesn't look like it will fly either. (Two problems: during crash
> recovery, you couldn't be sure that what's on disk for the underlying
> table exactly matches the index you need to build --- it could be a
> later state of the table; and besides, the environment of the WAL replay
> process isn't capable of running user-defined functions, so it couldn't
> work for functional indexes.)
>
> So AFAICS, we've got to dump the index contents into WAL to support
> PITR. This is a tad annoying.

Is it possible in this case to dump the index block by block into the log
after it has been generated? It seems to me this should reduce the
amount of data we write to WAL and (therefore) speed up the rebuild.

Gavin