Now indexes (but only B-tree for now) can contain "extra" column(s) which
doesn't participate in index structure, they are just stored in leaf
tuples. It allows to use index only scan by using single index instead
of two or more indexes.
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with minor editorializing by me
Reviewers: David Rowley, Peter Geoghegan, Jeff Janes
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
Since C99, it's been standard for printf and friends to accept a "z" size
modifier, meaning "whatever size size_t has". Up to now we've generally
dealt with printing size_t values by explicitly casting them to unsigned
long and using the "l" modifier; but this is really the wrong thing on
platforms where pointers are wider than longs (such as Win64). So let's
start using "z" instead. To ensure we can do that on all platforms, teach
src/port/snprintf.c to understand "z", and add a configure test to force
use of that implementation when the platform's version doesn't handle "z".
Having done that, modify a bunch of places that were using the
unsigned-long hack to use "z" instead. This patch doesn't pretend to have
gotten everyplace that could benefit, but it catches many of them. I made
an effort in particular to ensure that all uses of the same error message
text were updated together, so as not to increase the number of
translatable strings.
It's possible that this change will result in format-string warnings from
pre-C99 compilers. We might have to reconsider if there are any popular
compilers that will warn about this; but let's start by seeing what the
buildfarm thinks.
Andres Freund, with a little additional work by me
This includes two micro-optimizations to the tight inner loop in descending
the SP-GiST tree: 1. avoid an extra function call to index_getprocinfo when
calling user-defined choose function, and 2. avoid a useless palloc+pfree
when node labels are not used.
The correct test for whether a redirection tuple is removable is whether
tuple's xid < RecentGlobalXmin, not OldestXmin; the previous coding
failed to protect index searches being done in concurrent transactions that
have no XID. This mirrors the recent fix in btree's page recycling logic
made in commit d3abbbebe52eb1e59e621c880ad57df9d40d13f2.
Also, WAL-log the newest XID of any removed redirection tuple on an index
page, and apply ResolveRecoveryConflictWithSnapshot during InHotStandby WAL
replay. This protects against concurrent Hot Standby transactions possibly
needing to see the redirection tuple(s).
Per my query of 2012-03-12 and subsequent discussion.
This patch fixes the other major compatibility-breaking limitation of
SPGiST, that it didn't store anything for null values of the indexed
column, and so could not support whole-index scans or "x IS NULL"
tests. The approach is to create a wholly separate search tree for
the null entries, and use fixed "allTheSame" insertion and search
rules when processing this tree, instead of calling the index opclass
methods. This way the opclass methods do not need to worry about
dealing with nulls.
Catversion bump is for pg_am updates as well as the change in on-disk
format of SPGiST indexes; there are some tweaks in SPGiST WAL records
as well.
Heavily rewritten version of a patch by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev.
(The original also stored nulls separately, but it reused GIN code to do
so; which required undesirable compromises in the on-disk format, and
would likely lead to bugs due to the GIN code being required to work in
two very different contexts.)
Operator classes can specify whether or not they support this; this
preserves the flexibility to use lossy representations within an index.
In passing, move constant data about a given index into the rd_amcache
cache area, instead of doing fresh lookups each time we start an index
operation. This is mainly to try to make sure that spgcanreturn() has
insignificant cost; I still don't have any proof that it matters for
actual index accesses. Also, get rid of useless copying of FmgrInfo
pointers; we can perfectly well use the relcache's versions in-place.
SP-GiST is comparable to GiST in flexibility, but supports non-balanced
partitioned search structures rather than balanced trees. As described at
PGCon 2011, this new indexing structure can beat GiST in both index build
time and query speed for search problems that it is well matched to.
There are a number of areas that could still use improvement, but at this
point the code seems committable.
Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov, with considerable revisions by Tom Lane
