Per my recent proposal(s). Null key datums can now be returned by
extractValue and extractQuery functions, and will be stored in the index.
Also, placeholder entries are made for indexable items that are NULL or
contain no keys according to extractValue. This means that the index is
now always complete, having at least one entry for every indexed heap TID,
and so we can get rid of the prohibition on full-index scans. A full-index
scan is implemented much the same way as partial-match scans were already:
we build a bitmap representing all the TIDs found in the index, and then
drive the results off that.
Also, introduce a concept of a "search mode" that can be requested by
extractQuery when the operator requires matching to empty items (this is
just as cheap as matching to a single key) or requires a full index scan
(which is not so cheap, but it sure beats failing or giving wrong answers).
The behavior remains backward compatible for opclasses that don't return
any null keys or request a non-default search mode.
Using these features, we can now make the GIN index opclass for anyarray
behave in a way that matches the actual anyarray operators for &&, <@, @>,
and = ... which it failed to do before in assorted corner cases.
This commit fixes the core GIN code and ginarrayprocs.c, updates the
documentation, and adds some simple regression test cases for the new
behaviors using the array operators. The tsearch and contrib GIN opclass
support functions still need to be looked over and probably fixed.
Another thing I intend to fix separately is that this is pretty inefficient
for cases where more than one scan condition needs a full-index search:
we'll run duplicate GinScanEntrys, each one of which builds a large bitmap.
There is some existing logic to merge duplicate GinScanEntrys but it needs
refactoring to make it work for entries belonging to different scan keys.
Note that most of gin.h has been split out into a new file gin_private.h,
so that gin.h doesn't export anything that's not supposed to be used by GIN
opclasses or the rest of the backend. I did quite a bit of other code
beautification work as well, mostly fixing comments and choosing more
appropriate names for things.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
method to pass extra data to the consistent() and comparePartial() methods.
This is the core infrastructure needed to support the soon-to-appear
contrib/btree_gin module. The APIs are still upward compatible with the
definitions used in 8.3 and before, although *not* with the previous 8.4devel
function definitions.
catversion bump for changes in pg_proc entries (although these are just
cosmetic, since GIN doesn't actually look at the function signature before
calling it...)
Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov
multiple index entries in a holding area before adding them to the main index
structure. This helps because bulk insert is (usually) significantly faster
than retail insert for GIN.
This patch also removes GIN support for amgettuple-style index scans. The
API defined for amgettuple is difficult to support with fastupdate, and
the previously committed partial-match feature didn't really work with
it either. We might eventually figure a way to put back amgettuple
support, but it won't happen for 8.4.
catversion bumped because of change in GIN's pg_am entry, and because
the format of GIN indexes changed on-disk (there's a metapage now,
and possibly a pending list).
Teodor Sigaev
"consistent" functions, and remove pg_amop.opreqcheck, as per recent
discussion. The main immediate benefit of this is that we no longer need
8.3's ugly hack of requiring @@@ rather than @@ to test weight-using tsquery
searches on GIN indexes. In future it should be possible to optimize some
other queries better than is done now, by detecting at runtime whether the
index match is exact or not.
Tom Lane, after an idea of Heikki's, and with some help from Teodor.
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".
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.
In this case extractQuery should returns -1 as nentries. This changes
prototype of extractQuery method to use int32* instead of uint32* for
nentries argument.
Based on that gincostestimate may see two corner cases: nothing will be found
or seqscan should be used.
Per proposal at http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-01/msg01581.php
PS tsearch_core patch should be sightly modified to support changes, but I'm
waiting a verdict about reviewing of tsearch_core patch.