Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
documenting GiST crash recovery procedures, as requested some time ago
by Teodor. (The GiST chapter doesn't seem quite the right place for
the latter, but I'm not sure what else to do with it.)
- make sure we always invoke user-supplied GiST methods in a short-lived
memory context. This means the backend isn't exposed to any memory leaks
that be in those methods (in fact, it is probably a net loss for most
GiST methods to bother manually freeing memory now). This also means
we can do away with a lot of ugly manual memory management in the
GiST code itself.
- keep the current page of a GiST index scan pinned, rather than doing a
ReadBuffer() for each tuple produced by the scan. Since ReadBuffer() is
expensive, this is a perf. win
- implement dead tuple killing for GiST indexes (which is easy to do, now
that we keep a pin on the current scan page). Now all the builtin indexes
implement dead tuple killing.
- cleanup a lot of ugly code in GiST