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.)
On reflection, the original name seems way too generic for a global
symbol. A quick check shows this is the only exported function name
in SP-GiST that doesn't begin with "spg" or contain "SpGist", so the
rest of them seem all right.
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
