Subject: GIT patch review

From: Alexey Klyukin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 16:36:18 +0300

Hello,

I'd like to help reviewing patches, in particular the group index tupes (GIT)
patch by Heikki Linnakangas
(http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-02/msg01264.php).
I've spoken with Alvaro about it, he gave me several links to the threads on
hackers related to the GIT patch and I have some questions:

What about proposition for indexam changes, I can't find any patches there ?

(http://momjian.us/mhonarc/patches/msg00125.html)

Is the patch for changing amgetmulti to amgetbitmap relevant to the GIT patch ?

This original patch is here:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2007-03/msg00163.php

It doesn't apply cleanly to the cvs head, I can provide necessary changes
(actually I've sent them and figured there is a nowhere mentioned limit on
-hackers which is why I'm resending the message without that patch),

Any other suggestions on reviewing the GIT patch ?

Regards,
-- 
Alexey Klyukin                         http://www.commandprompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.

---

From: Heikki Linnakangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 21:41:52 +0100

> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2007-03/msg00163.php

The fundamental change to the indexam API that GIT requires is support 
for returning candidate matches. There's two parts to that: the bitmap 
index scan API (amgetmulti) and the regular amgettuple API.

Another issue that needs to be dealt with is that as the GIT patch 
stands, it doesn't retain the ordering of tuples within a heap page, 
which means that they need to be sorted on a page-by-page basis when 
returning them to the executor. That's ugly, the way it's implemented 
now. To make it less ugly, we'd need support in the amgettuple API to 
return tuples in partial ordering.

Since there was discussion on changing the bitmap index API to make it 
more efficient for on-disk bitmap indexes, I created a combined patch 
that both works nicely with on-disk bitmap indexes, and supports 
candidate matches. That's what the amgetmulti->amgetbitmap patch does.

The other part, supporting candidate matches in the amgettuple API 
hasn't been done. I posted a design that's in the patch queue ("Indexam 
interface proposal"), hoping to have a consensus on that. There was some 
discussion on using the candidate matches support for GIN and GiST as 
well. IIRC there was no objections to the candidate matches support, but 
I haven't written a patch to do that.

A more controversial and invasive change is the support for returning 
tuples in partial ordering. If we don't want to do that, we can modify 
the main GIT/clustered indexes patch so that it does retain the full 
ordering of tuples. It'll degrade much more quickly to a normal B-tree 
if tuples are not perfectly ordered on the heap, if tuples are updated 
for examply, but it'll be less invasive.

> -hackers which is why I'm resending the message without that patch),

Ok, thanks.

> Any other suggestions on reviewing the GIT patch ?

You might want to start by reading the readme: 
http://community.enterprisedb.com/git/git-readme.txt

Thanks for looking into this. If you have any questions, just ask.

-- 
   Heikki Linnakangas
   EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

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