Date: Sun, 26 May 2019 00:14:28 +0200
From: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Ancoron Luciferis <ancoron.luciferis@googlemail.com>,
	pgsql-performance@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: UUID v1 optimizations...
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On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 05:54:15PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>Ancoron Luciferis <ancoron.luciferis@googlemail.com> writes:
>> On 25/05/2019 16:57, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> (4) it in fact *wouldn't* do anything useful, because we'd still have
>>> to sort UUIDs in the same order as today, meaning that btree index behavior
>>> would remain the same as before.  Plus UUID comparison would get a lot
>>> more complicated and slower than it is now.
>
>> I get your first sentence, but not your second. I know that when
>> changing the internal byte order we'd have to completed re-compute
>> everything on-disk (from table to index data), but why would the sorting
>> in the index have to be the same?
>
>Because we aren't going to change the existing sort order of UUIDs.
>We have no idea what applications might be dependent on that.
>
>As Vitalii correctly pointed out, your beef is not with the physical
>storage of UUIDs anyway: you just wish they'd sort differently, since
>that is what determines the behavior of a btree index.  But we aren't
>going to change the sort ordering because that's an even bigger
>compatibility break than changing the physical storage; it'd affect
>application-visible semantics.
>
>What you might want to think about is creating a function that maps
>UUIDs into an ordering that makes sense to you, and then creating
>a unique index over that function instead of the raw UUIDs.  That
>would give the results you want without having to negotiate with the
>rest of the world about whether it's okay to change the semantics
>of type uuid.
>

FWIW that's essentially what I implemented as an extension some time
ago. See [1] for a more detailed explanation and some benchmarks.

The thing is - it's not really desirable to get perfectly ordered
ordering, because that would mean we never get back to older parts of
the index (so if you delete data, we'd never fill that space).

[1] https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/sequential-uuid-generators/


regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services