Subject: Re: hash index improving v3
From: Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: "Jonah H. Harris" <jonah.harris@gmail.com>,
	Alex Hunsaker <badalex@gmail.com>, Kenneth Marshall <ktm@rice.edu>,
	Xiao Meng <mx.cogito@gmail.com>, Zdenek Kotala <Zdenek.Kotala@sun.com>,
	pgsql-patches@postgresql.org
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Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:05:15 +0100
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On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 08:16 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com> writes:
> > maintenance_work_mem is already used for 3 separate operations that bear
> > little resemblance to each other. If it's appropriate for all of those
> > then its appropriate for this usage also.
> 
> No, it isn't.
> 
> The fundamental point here is that this isn't a memory allocation
> parameter; it's a switchover threshold between two different behaviors.

That's a little confusing since sorts switch their behaviour also, but
use (some form of) work_mem, which is *also* their max allocation. I see
the difficulty in understanding the algorithm's behaviour now.

So shared_buffers is the wrong parameter, but even if we had a parameter
it would be very difficult to set it. 

Thinks: Why not just sort all of the time and skip the debate entirely?
I thought the main use case was for larger indexes, since that's when
the number of levels in the index is significantly less than btrees? Do
we need to optimise creation time of smaller hash indexes at all?

-- 
 Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.com
 PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support