The chapter "Interfacing Extensions To Indexes" and CREATE OPERATOR
CLASS reference page were missed when BRIN was added. We document
all our other index access methods there, so make sure BRIN complies.
Author: Álvaro Herrera
Reported-By: Julien Rouhaud, Tom Lane
Reviewed-By: Emre Hasegeli
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/56CF604E.9000303%40dalibo.com
Backpatch: 9.5, where BRIN was introduced
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
Commit d04c8ed904 added another support function to the GIST API,
but overlooked mentioning it in xindex.sgml's summary of index support
functions.
Anastasia Lubennikova
With the GIN "fast scan" feature, GIN can skip items without fetching all
the keys for them, if it can prove that they don't match regardless of
those keys. So far, it has done the proving by calling the boolean
consistent function with all combinations of TRUE/FALSE for the unfetched
keys, but since that's O(n^2), it becomes unfeasible with more than a few
keys. We can avoid calling consistent with all the combinations, if we can
tell the operator class implementation directly which keys are unknown.
This commit includes a triConsistent function for the built-in array and
tsvector opclasses.
Alexander Korotkov, with some changes by me.
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 creates an API whereby a btree index opclass can optionally
provide non-SQL-callable support functions for sorting. In the initial
patch, we only use this to provide a directly-callable comparator function,
which can be invoked with a bit less overhead than the traditional
SQL-callable comparator. While that should be of value in itself, the real
reason for doing this is to provide a datatype-extensible framework for
more aggressive optimizations, as in Peter Geoghegan's recent work.
Robert Haas and Tom Lane
This commit adds columns amoppurpose and amopsortfamily to pg_amop, and
column amcanorderbyop to pg_am. For the moment all the entries in
amcanorderbyop are "false", since the underlying support isn't there yet.
Also, extend the CREATE OPERATOR CLASS/ALTER OPERATOR FAMILY commands with
[ FOR SEARCH | FOR ORDER BY sort_operator_family ] clauses to allow the new
columns of pg_amop to be populated, and create pg_dump support for dumping
that information.
I also added some documentation, although it's perhaps a bit premature
given that the feature doesn't do anything useful yet.
Teodor Sigaev, Robert Haas, Tom Lane
"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".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
provide just a boolean 'amcanorder', instead of fields that specify the
sort operator strategy numbers. We have decided to require ordering-capable
AMs to use btree-compatible strategy numbers, so the old fields are
overkill (and indeed misleading about what's allowed).
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
to the existing X-direction tests. An rtree class now includes 4 actual
2-D tests, 4 1-D X-direction tests, and 4 1-D Y-direction tests.
This involved adding four new Y-direction test operators for each of
box and polygon; I followed the PostGIS project's lead as to the names
of these operators.
NON BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE CHANGE: the poly_overleft (&<) and poly_overright
(&>) operators now have semantics comparable to box_overleft and box_overright.
This is necessary to make r-tree indexes work correctly on polygons.
Also, I changed circle_left and circle_right to agree with box_left and
box_right --- formerly they allowed the boundaries to touch. This isn't
actually essential given the lack of any r-tree opclass for circles, but
it seems best to sync all the definitions while we are at it.
pghackers proposal of 8-Nov. All the existing cross-type comparison
operators (int2/int4/int8 and float4/float8) have appropriate support.
The original proposal of storing the right-hand-side datatype as part of
the primary key for pg_amop and pg_amproc got modified a bit in the event;
it is easier to store zero as the 'default' case and only store a nonzero
when the operator is actually cross-type. Along the way, remove the
long-since-defunct bigbox_ops operator class.
Peter Eisentraut
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway
Teodor Sigaev
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