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
This patch adds the server infrastructure to support extensions.
There is still one significant loose end, namely how to make it play nice
with pg_upgrade, so I am not yet committing the changes that would make
all the contrib modules depend on this feature.
In passing, fix a disturbingly large amount of breakage in
AlterObjectNamespace() and callers.
Dimitri Fontaine, reviewed by Anssi Kääriäinen,
Itagaki Takahiro, Tom Lane, and numerous others
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.