pgsql-hackers. pg_opclass now has a row for each opclass supported by each
index AM, not a row for each opclass name. This allows pg_opclass to show
directly whether an AM supports an opclass, and furthermore makes it possible
to store additional information about an opclass that might be AM-dependent.
pg_opclass and pg_amop now store "lossy" and "haskeytype" information that we
previously expected the user to remember to provide in CREATE INDEX commands.
Lossiness is no longer an index-level property, but is associated with the
use of a particular operator in a particular index opclass.
Along the way, IndexSupportInitialize now uses the syscaches to retrieve
pg_amop and pg_amproc entries. I find this reduces backend launch time by
about ten percent, at the cost of a couple more special cases in catcache.c's
IndexScanOK.
Initial work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev, further hacking by Tom Lane.
initdb forced.
default, but OIDS are removed from many system catalogs that don't need them.
Some interesting side effects: TOAST pointers are 20 bytes not 32 now;
pg_description has a three-column key instead of one.
Bugs fixed in passing: BINARY cursors work again; pg_class.relhaspkey
has some usefulness; pg_dump dumps comments on indexes, rules, and
triggers in a valid order.
initdb forced.
per previous discussion on pghackers. Most of the duplicate code in
different AMs' ambuild routines has been moved out to a common routine
in index.c; this means that all index types now do the right things about
inserting recently-dead tuples, etc. (I also removed support for EXTEND
INDEX in the ambuild routines, since that's about to go away anyway, and
it cluttered the code a lot.) The retail indextuple deletion routines have
been replaced by a "bulk delete" routine in which the indexscan is inside
the access method. I haven't pushed this change as far as it should go yet,
but it should allow considerable simplification of the internal bookkeeping
for deletions. Also, add flag columns to pg_am to eliminate various
hardcoded tests on AM OIDs, and remove unused pg_am columns.
Fix rtree and gist index types to not attempt to store NULLs; before this,
gist usually crashed, while rtree managed not to crash but computed wacko
bounding boxes for NULL entries (which might have had something to do with
the performance problems we've heard about occasionally).
Add AtEOXact routines to hash, rtree, and gist, all of which have static
state that needs to be reset after an error. We discovered this need long
ago for btree, but missed the other guys.
Oh, one more thing: concurrent VACUUM is now the default.
a separate statement (though it can still be invoked as part of VACUUM, too).
pg_statistic redesigned to be more flexible about what statistics are
stored. ANALYZE now collects a list of several of the most common values,
not just one, plus a histogram (not just the min and max values). Random
sampling is used to make the process reasonably fast even on very large
tables. The number of values and histogram bins collected is now
user-settable via an ALTER TABLE command.
There is more still to do; the new stats are not being used everywhere
they could be in the planner. But the remaining changes for this project
should be localized, and the behavior is already better than before.
A not-very-related change is that sorting now makes use of btree comparison
routines if it can find one, rather than invoking '<' twice.
There's now only one transition value and transition function.
NULL handling in aggregates is a lot cleaner. Also, use Numeric
accumulators instead of integer accumulators for sum/avg on integer
datatypes --- this avoids overflow at the cost of being a little slower.
Implement VARIANCE() and STDDEV() aggregates in the standard backend.
Also, enable new LIKE selectivity estimators by default. Unrelated
change, but as long as I had to force initdb anyway...
Tom Lane
Thomas G. Lockhart