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
Tom Lane