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README |
src/backend/access/nbtree/README Btree Indexing ============== This directory contains a correct implementation of Lehman and Yao's high-concurrency B-tree management algorithm (P. Lehman and S. Yao, Efficient Locking for Concurrent Operations on B-Trees, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol 6, No. 4, December 1981, pp 650-670). We also use a simplified version of the deletion logic described in Lanin and Shasha (V. Lanin and D. Shasha, A Symmetric Concurrent B-Tree Algorithm, Proceedings of 1986 Fall Joint Computer Conference, pp 380-389). The basic Lehman & Yao Algorithm -------------------------------- Compared to a classic B-tree, L&Y adds a right-link pointer to each page, to the page's right sibling. It also adds a "high key" to each page, which is an upper bound on the keys that are allowed on that page. These two additions make it possible detect a concurrent page split, which allows the tree to be searched without holding any read locks (except to keep a single page from being modified while reading it). When a search follows a downlink to a child page, it compares the page's high key with the search key. If the search key is greater than the high key, the page must've been split concurrently, and you must follow the right-link to find the new page containing the key range you're looking for. This might need to be repeated, if the page has been split more than once. Differences to the Lehman & Yao algorithm ----------------------------------------- We have made the following changes in order to incorporate the L&Y algorithm into Postgres: The requirement that all btree keys be unique is too onerous, but the algorithm won't work correctly without it. Fortunately, it is only necessary that keys be unique on a single tree level, because L&Y only use the assumption of key uniqueness when re-finding a key in a parent page (to determine where to insert the key for a split page). Therefore, we can use the link field to disambiguate multiple occurrences of the same user key: only one entry in the parent level will be pointing at the page we had split. (Indeed we need not look at the real "key" at all, just at the link field.) We can distinguish items at the leaf level in the same way, by examining their links to heap tuples; we'd never have two items for the same heap tuple. Lehman and Yao assume that the key range for a subtree S is described by Ki < v <= Ki+1 where Ki and Ki+1 are the adjacent keys in the parent page. This does not work for nonunique keys (for example, if we have enough equal keys to spread across several leaf pages, there *must* be some equal bounding keys in the first level up). Therefore we assume Ki <= v <= Ki+1 instead. A search that finds exact equality to a bounding key in an upper tree level must descend to the left of that key to ensure it finds any equal keys in the preceding page. An insertion that sees the high key of its target page is equal to the key to be inserted has a choice whether or not to move right, since the new key could go on either page. (Currently, we try to find a page where there is room for the new key without a split.) Lehman and Yao don't require read locks, but assume that in-memory copies of tree pages are unshared. Postgres shares in-memory buffers among backends. As a result, we do page-level read locking on btree pages in order to guarantee that no record is modified while we are examining it. This reduces concurrency but guarantees correct behavior. An advantage is that when trading in a read lock for a write lock, we need not re-read the page after getting the write lock. Since we're also holding a pin on the shared buffer containing the page, we know that buffer still contains the page and is up-to-date. We support the notion of an ordered "scan" of an index as well as insertions, deletions, and simple lookups. A scan in the forward direction is no problem, we just use the right-sibling pointers that L&Y require anyway. (Thus, once we have descended the tree to the correct start point for the scan, the scan looks only at leaf pages and never at higher tree levels.) To support scans in the backward direction, we also store a "left sibling" link much like the "right sibling". (This adds an extra step to the L&Y split algorithm: while holding the write lock on the page being split, we also lock its former right sibling to update that page's left-link. This is safe since no writer of that page can be interested in acquiring a write lock on our page.) A backwards scan has one additional bit of complexity: after following the left-link we must account for the possibility that the left sibling page got split before we could read it. So, we have to move right until we find a page whose right-link matches the page we came from. (Actually, it's even harder than that; see deletion discussion below.) Page read locks are held only for as long as a scan is examining a page. To minimize lock/unlock traffic, an index scan always searches a leaf page to identify all the matching items at once, copying their heap tuple IDs into backend-local storage. The heap tuple IDs are then processed while not holding any page lock within the index. We do continue to hold a pin on the leaf page in some circumstances, to protect against concurrent deletions (see below). In this state the scan is effectively stopped "between" pages, either before or after the page it has pinned. This is safe in the presence of concurrent insertions and even page splits, because items are never moved across pre-existing page boundaries --- so the scan cannot miss any items it should have seen, nor accidentally return the same item twice. The scan must remember the page's right-link at the time it was scanned, since that is the page to move right to; if we move right to the current right-link then we'd re-scan any items moved by a page split. We don't similarly remember the left-link, since it's best to use the most up-to-date left-link when trying to move left (see detailed move-left algorithm below). In most cases we release our lock and pin on a page before attempting to acquire pin and lock on the page we are moving to. In a few places it is necessary to lock the next page before releasing the current one. This is safe when moving right or up, but not when moving left or down (else we'd create the possibility of deadlocks). Lehman and Yao fail to discuss what must happen when the root page becomes full and must be split. Our implementation is to split the root in the same way that any other page would be split, then construct a new root page holding pointers to both of the resulting pages (which now become siblings on the next level of the tree). The new root page is then installed by altering the root pointer in the meta-data page (see below). This works because the root is not treated specially in any other way --- in particular, searches will move right using its link pointer if the link is set. Therefore, searches will find the data that's been moved into the right sibling even if they read the meta-data page before it got updated. This is the same reasoning that makes a split of a non-root page safe. The locking considerations are similar too. When an inserter recurses up the tree, splitting internal pages to insert links to pages inserted on the level below, it is possible that it will need to access a page above the level that was the root when it began its descent (or more accurately, the level that was the root when it read the meta-data page). In this case the stack it made while descending does not help for finding the correct page. When this happens, we find the correct place by re-descending the tree until we reach the level one above the level we need to insert a link to, and then moving right as necessary. (Typically this will take only two fetches, the meta-data page and the new root, but in principle there could have been more than one root split since we saw the root. We can identify the correct tree level by means of the level numbers stored in each page. The situation is rare enough that we do not need a more efficient solution.) Lehman and Yao assume fixed-size keys, but we must deal with variable-size keys. Therefore there is not a fixed maximum number of keys per page; we just stuff in as many as will fit. When we split a page, we try to equalize the number of bytes, not items, assigned to each of the resulting pages. Note we must include the incoming item in this calculation, otherwise it is possible to find that the incoming item doesn't fit on the split page where it needs to go! The Deletion Algorithm ---------------------- Before deleting a leaf item, we get a super-exclusive lock on the target page, so that no other backend has a pin on the page when the deletion starts. This is not necessary for correctness in terms of the btree index operations themselves; as explained above, index scans logically stop "between" pages and so can't lose their place. The reason we do it is to provide an interlock between non-full VACUUM and indexscans. Since VACUUM deletes index entries before reclaiming heap tuple line pointers, the super-exclusive lock guarantees that VACUUM can't reclaim for re-use a line pointer that an indexscanning process might be about to visit. This guarantee works only for simple indexscans that visit the heap in sync with the index scan, not for bitmap scans. We only need the guarantee when using non-MVCC snapshot rules; when using an MVCC snapshot, it doesn't matter if the heap tuple is replaced with an unrelated tuple at the same TID, because the new tuple won't be visible to our scan anyway. Therefore, a scan using an MVCC snapshot which has no other confounding factors will not hold the pin after the page contents are read. The current reasons for exceptions, where a pin is still needed, are if the index is not WAL-logged or if the scan is an index-only scan. If later work allows the pin to be dropped for all cases we will be able to simplify the vacuum code, since the concept of a super-exclusive lock for btree indexes will no longer be needed. Because a pin is not always held, and a page can be split even while someone does hold a pin on it, it is possible that an indexscan will return items that are no longer stored on the page it has a pin on, but rather somewhere to the right of that page. To ensure that VACUUM can't prematurely remove such heap tuples, we require btbulkdelete to obtain a super-exclusive lock on every leaf page in the index, even pages that don't contain any deletable tuples. Any scan which could yield incorrect results if the tuple at a TID matching the scan's range and filter conditions were replaced by a different tuple while the scan is in progress must hold the pin on each index page until all index entries read from the page have been processed. This guarantees that the btbulkdelete call cannot return while any indexscan is still holding a copy of a deleted index tuple if the scan could be confused by that. Note that this requirement does not say that btbulkdelete must visit the pages in any particular order. (See also on-the-fly deletion, below.) There is no such interlocking for deletion of items in internal pages, since backends keep no lock nor pin on a page they have descended past. Hence, when a backend is ascending the tree using its stack, it must be prepared for the possibility that the item it wants is to the left of the recorded position (but it can't have moved left out of the recorded page). Since we hold a lock on the lower page (per L&Y) until we have re-found the parent item that links to it, we can be assured that the parent item does still exist and can't have been deleted. Also, because we are matching downlink page numbers and not data keys, we don't have any problem with possibly misidentifying the parent item. Page Deletion ------------- We consider deleting an entire page from the btree only when it's become completely empty of items. (Merging partly-full pages would allow better space reuse, but it seems impractical to move existing data items left or right to make this happen --- a scan moving in the opposite direction might miss the items if so.) Also, we *never* delete the rightmost page on a tree level (this restriction simplifies the traversal algorithms, as explained below). Page deletion always begins from an empty leaf page. An internal page can only be deleted as part of a branch leading to a leaf page, where each internal page has only one child and that child is also to be deleted. Deleting a leaf page is a two-stage process. In the first stage, the page is unlinked from its parent, and marked as half-dead. The parent page must be found using the same type of search as used to find the parent during an insertion split. We lock the target and the parent pages, change the target's downlink to point to the right sibling, and remove its old downlink. This causes the target page's key space to effectively belong to its right sibling. (Neither the left nor right sibling pages need to change their "high key" if any; so there is no problem with possibly not having enough space to replace a high key.) At the same time, we mark the target page as half-dead, which causes any subsequent searches to ignore it and move right (or left, in a backwards scan). This leaves the tree in a similar state as during a page split: the page has no downlink pointing to it, but it's still linked to its siblings. (Note: Lanin and Shasha prefer to make the key space move left, but their argument for doing so hinges on not having left-links, which we have anyway. So we simplify the algorithm by moving key space right.) To preserve consistency on the parent level, we cannot merge the key space of a page into its right sibling unless the right sibling is a child of the same parent --- otherwise, the parent's key space assignment changes too, meaning we'd have to make bounding-key updates in its parent, and perhaps all the way up the tree. Since we can't possibly do that atomically, we forbid this case. That means that the rightmost child of a parent node can't be deleted unless it's the only remaining child, in which case we will delete the parent too (see below). In the second-stage, the half-dead leaf page is unlinked from its siblings. We first lock the left sibling (if any) of the target, the target page itself, and its right sibling (there must be one) in that order. Then we update the side-links in the siblings, and mark the target page deleted. When we're about to delete the last remaining child of a parent page, things are slightly more complicated. In the first stage, we leave the immediate parent of the leaf page alone, and remove the downlink to the parent page instead, from the grandparent. If it's the last child of the grandparent too, we recurse up until we find a parent with more than one child, and remove the downlink of that page. The leaf page is marked as half-dead, and the block number of the page whose downlink was removed is stashed in the half-dead leaf page. This leaves us with a chain of internal pages, with one downlink each, leading to the half-dead leaf page, and no downlink pointing to the topmost page in the chain. While we recurse up to find the topmost parent in the chain, we keep the leaf page locked, but don't need to hold locks on the intermediate pages between the leaf and the topmost parent -- insertions into upper tree levels happen only as a result of splits of child pages, and that can't happen as long as we're keeping the leaf locked. The internal pages in the chain cannot acquire new children afterwards either, because the leaf page is marked as half-dead and won't be split. Removing the downlink to the top of the to-be-deleted chain effectively transfers the key space to the right sibling for all the intermediate levels too, in one atomic operation. A concurrent search might still visit the intermediate pages, but it will move right when it reaches the half-dead page at the leaf level. In the second stage, the topmost page in the chain is unlinked from its siblings, and the half-dead leaf page is updated to point to the next page down in the chain. This is repeated until there are no internal pages left in the chain. Finally, the half-dead leaf page itself is unlinked from its siblings. A deleted page cannot be reclaimed immediately, since there may be other processes waiting to reference it (ie, search processes that just left the parent, or scans moving right or left from one of the siblings). These processes must observe that the page is marked dead and recover accordingly. Searches and forward scans simply follow the right-link until they find a non-dead page --- this will be where the deleted page's key-space moved to. Moving left in a backward scan is complicated because we must consider the possibility that the left sibling was just split (meaning we must find the rightmost page derived from the left sibling), plus the possibility that the page we were just on has now been deleted and hence isn't in the sibling chain at all anymore. So the move-left algorithm becomes: 0. Remember the page we are on as the "original page". 1. Follow the original page's left-link (we're done if this is zero). 2. If the current page is live and its right-link matches the "original page", we are done. 3. Otherwise, move right one or more times looking for a live page whose right-link matches the "original page". If found, we are done. (In principle we could scan all the way to the right end of the index, but in practice it seems better to give up after a small number of tries. It's unlikely the original page's sibling split more than a few times while we were in flight to it; if we do not find a matching link in a few tries, then most likely the original page is deleted.) 4. Return to the "original page". If it is still live, return to step 1 (we guessed wrong about it being deleted, and should restart with its current left-link). If it is dead, move right until a non-dead page is found (there must be one, since rightmost pages are never deleted), mark that as the new "original page", and return to step 1. This algorithm is correct because the live page found by step 4 will have the same left keyspace boundary as the page we started from. Therefore, when we ultimately exit, it must be on a page whose right keyspace boundary matches the left boundary of where we started --- which is what we need to be sure we don't miss or re-scan any items. A deleted page can only be reclaimed once there is no scan or search that has a reference to it; until then, it must stay in place with its right-link undisturbed. We implement this by waiting until all active snapshots and registered snapshots as of the deletion are gone; which is overly strong, but is simple to implement within Postgres. When marked dead, a deleted page is labeled with the next-transaction counter value. VACUUM can reclaim the page for re-use when this transaction number is older than RecentGlobalXmin. As collateral damage, this implementation also waits for running XIDs with no snapshots and for snapshots taken until the next transaction to allocate an XID commits. Reclaiming a page doesn't actually change its state on disk --- we simply record it in the shared-memory free space map, from which it will be handed out the next time a new page is needed for a page split. The deleted page's contents will be overwritten by the split operation. (Note: if we find a deleted page with an extremely old transaction number, it'd be worthwhile to re-mark it with FrozenTransactionId so that a later xid wraparound can't cause us to think the page is unreclaimable. But in more normal situations this would be a waste of a disk write.) Because we never delete the rightmost page of any level (and in particular never delete the root), it's impossible for the height of the tree to decrease. After massive deletions we might have a scenario in which the tree is "skinny", with several single-page levels below the root. Operations will still be correct in this case, but we'd waste cycles descending through the single-page levels. To handle this we use an idea from Lanin and Shasha: we keep track of the "fast root" level, which is the lowest single-page level. The meta-data page keeps a pointer to this level as well as the true root. All ordinary operations initiate their searches at the fast root not the true root. When we split a page that is alone on its level or delete the next-to-last page on a level (both cases are easily detected), we have to make sure that the fast root pointer is adjusted appropriately. In the split case, we do this work as part of the atomic update for the insertion into the parent level; in the delete case as part of the atomic update for the delete (either way, the metapage has to be the last page locked in the update to avoid deadlock risks). This avoids race conditions if two such operations are executing concurrently. VACUUM needs to do a linear scan of an index to search for deleted pages that can be reclaimed because they are older than all open transactions. For efficiency's sake, we'd like to use the same linear scan to search for deletable tuples. Before Postgres 8.2, btbulkdelete scanned the leaf pages in index order, but it is possible to visit them in physical order instead. The tricky part of this is to avoid missing any deletable tuples in the presence of concurrent page splits: a page split could easily move some tuples from a page not yet passed over by the sequential scan to a lower-numbered page already passed over. (This wasn't a concern for the index-order scan, because splits always split right.) To implement this, we provide a "vacuum cycle ID" mechanism that makes it possible to determine whether a page has been split since the current btbulkdelete cycle started. If btbulkdelete finds a page that has been split since it started, and has a right-link pointing to a lower page number, then it temporarily suspends its sequential scan and visits that page instead. It must continue to follow right-links and vacuum dead tuples until reaching a page that either hasn't been split since btbulkdelete started, or is above the location of the outer sequential scan. Then it can resume the sequential scan. This ensures that all tuples are visited. It may be that some tuples are visited twice, but that has no worse effect than an inaccurate index tuple count (and we can't guarantee an accurate count anyway in the face of concurrent activity). Note that this still works if the has-been-recently-split test has a small probability of false positives, so long as it never gives a false negative. This makes it possible to implement the test with a small counter value stored on each index page. On-the-Fly Deletion Of Index Tuples ----------------------------------- If a process visits a heap tuple and finds that it's dead and removable (ie, dead to all open transactions, not only that process), then we can return to the index and mark the corresponding index entry "known dead", allowing subsequent index scans to skip visiting the heap tuple. The "known dead" marking works by setting the index item's lp_flags state to LP_DEAD. This is currently only done in plain indexscans, not bitmap scans, because only plain scans visit the heap and index "in sync" and so there's not a convenient way to do it for bitmap scans. Once an index tuple has been marked LP_DEAD it can actually be removed from the index immediately; since index scans only stop "between" pages, no scan can lose its place from such a deletion. We separate the steps because we allow LP_DEAD to be set with only a share lock (it's exactly like a hint bit for a heap tuple), but physically removing tuples requires exclusive lock. In the current code we try to remove LP_DEAD tuples when we are otherwise faced with having to split a page to do an insertion (and hence have exclusive lock on it already). This leaves the index in a state where it has no entry for a dead tuple that still exists in the heap. This is not a problem for the current implementation of VACUUM, but it could be a problem for anything that explicitly tries to find index entries for dead tuples. (However, the same situation is created by REINDEX, since it doesn't enter dead tuples into the index.) It's sufficient to have an exclusive lock on the index page, not a super-exclusive lock, to do deletion of LP_DEAD items. It might seem that this breaks the interlock between VACUUM and indexscans, but that is not so: as long as an indexscanning process has a pin on the page where the index item used to be, VACUUM cannot complete its btbulkdelete scan and so cannot remove the heap tuple. This is another reason why btbulkdelete has to get a super-exclusive lock on every leaf page, not only the ones where it actually sees items to delete. So that we can handle the cases where we attempt LP_DEAD flagging for a page after we have released its pin, we remember the LSN of the index page when we read the index tuples from it; we do not attempt to flag index tuples as dead if the we didn't hold the pin the entire time and the LSN has changed. WAL Considerations ------------------ The insertion and deletion algorithms in themselves don't guarantee btree consistency after a crash. To provide robustness, we depend on WAL replay. A single WAL entry is effectively an atomic action --- we can redo it from the log if it fails to complete. Ordinary item insertions (that don't force a page split) are of course single WAL entries, since they only affect one page. The same for leaf-item deletions (if the deletion brings the leaf page to zero items, it is now a candidate to be deleted, but that is a separate action). An insertion that causes a page split is logged as a single WAL entry for the changes occurring on the insertion's level --- including update of the right sibling's left-link --- followed by a second WAL entry for the insertion on the parent level (which might itself be a page split, requiring an additional insertion above that, etc). For a root split, the followon WAL entry is a "new root" entry rather than an "insertion" entry, but details are otherwise much the same. Because splitting involves multiple atomic actions, it's possible that the system crashes between splitting a page and inserting the downlink for the new half to the parent. After recovery, the downlink for the new page will be missing. The search algorithm works correctly, as the page will be found by following the right-link from its left sibling, although if a lot of downlinks in the tree are missing, performance will suffer. A more serious consequence is that if the page without a downlink gets split again, the insertion algorithm will fail to find the location in the parent level to insert the downlink. Our approach is to create any missing downlinks on-the-fly, when searching the tree for a new insertion. It could be done during searches, too, but it seems best not to put any extra updates in what would otherwise be a read-only operation (updating is not possible in hot standby mode anyway). It would seem natural to add the missing downlinks in VACUUM, but since inserting a downlink might require splitting a page, it might fail if you run out of disk space. That would be bad during VACUUM - the reason for running VACUUM in the first place might be that you run out of disk space, and now VACUUM won't finish because you're out of disk space. In contrast, an insertion can require enlarging the physical file anyway. To identify missing downlinks, when a page is split, the left page is flagged to indicate that the split is not yet complete (INCOMPLETE_SPLIT). When the downlink is inserted to the parent, the flag is cleared atomically with the insertion. The child page is kept locked until the insertion in the parent is finished and the flag in the child cleared, but can be released immediately after that, before recursing up the tree if the parent also needs to be split. This ensures that incompletely split pages should not be seen under normal circumstances; only if insertion to the parent has failed for some reason. We flag the left page, even though it's the right page that's missing the downlink, because it's more convenient to know already when following the right-link from the left page to the right page that it will need to have its downlink inserted to the parent. When splitting a non-root page that is alone on its level, the required metapage update (of the "fast root" link) is performed and logged as part of the insertion into the parent level. When splitting the root page, the metapage update is handled as part of the "new root" action. Each step in page deletion is logged as a separate WAL entry: marking the leaf as half-dead and removing the downlink is one record, and unlinking a page is a second record. If vacuum is interrupted for some reason, or the system crashes, the tree is consistent for searches and insertions. The next VACUUM will find the half-dead leaf page and continue the deletion. Before 9.4, we used to keep track of incomplete splits and page deletions during recovery and finish them immediately at end of recovery, instead of doing it lazily at the next insertion or vacuum. However, that made the recovery much more complicated, and only fixed the problem when crash recovery was performed. An incomplete split can also occur if an otherwise recoverable error, like out-of-memory or out-of-disk-space, happens while inserting the downlink to the parent. Scans during Recovery --------------------- The btree index type can be safely used during recovery. During recovery we have at most one writer and potentially many readers. In that situation the locking requirements can be relaxed and we do not need double locking during block splits. Each WAL record makes changes to a single level of the btree using the correct locking sequence and so is safe for concurrent readers. Some readers may observe a block split in progress as they descend the tree, but they will simply move right onto the correct page. During recovery all index scans start with ignore_killed_tuples = false and we never set kill_prior_tuple. We do this because the oldest xmin on the standby server can be older than the oldest xmin on the master server, which means tuples can be marked as killed even when they are still visible on the standby. We don't WAL log tuple killed bits, but they can still appear in the standby because of full page writes. So we must always ignore them in standby, and that means it's not worth setting them either. Note that we talk about scans that are started during recovery. We go to a little trouble to allow a scan to start during recovery and end during normal running after recovery has completed. This is a key capability because it allows running applications to continue while the standby changes state into a normally running server. The interlocking required to avoid returning incorrect results from non-MVCC scans is not required on standby nodes. That is because HeapTupleSatisfiesUpdate(), HeapTupleSatisfiesSelf(), HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty() and HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum() are only ever used during write transactions, which cannot exist on the standby. MVCC scans are already protected by definition, so HeapTupleSatisfiesMVCC() is not a problem. That leaves concern only for HeapTupleSatisfiesToast(). HeapTupleSatisfiesToast() doesn't use MVCC semantics, though that's because it doesn't need to - if the main heap row is visible then the toast rows will also be visible. So as long as we follow a toast pointer from a visible (live) tuple the corresponding toast rows will also be visible, so we do not need to recheck MVCC on them. There is one minor exception, which is that the optimizer sometimes looks at the boundaries of value ranges using SnapshotDirty, which could result in returning a newer value for query statistics; this would affect the query plan in rare cases, but not the correctness. The risk window is small since the stats look at the min and max values in the index, so the scan retrieves a tid then immediately uses it to look in the heap. It is unlikely that the tid could have been deleted, vacuumed and re-inserted in the time taken to look in the heap via direct tid access. So we ignore that scan type as a problem. Other Things That Are Handy to Know ----------------------------------- Page zero of every btree is a meta-data page. This page stores the location of the root page --- both the true root and the current effective root ("fast" root). To avoid fetching the metapage for every single index search, we cache a copy of the meta-data information in the index's relcache entry (rd_amcache). This is a bit ticklish since using the cache implies following a root page pointer that could be stale. However, a backend following a cached pointer can sufficiently verify whether it reached the intended page; either by checking the is-root flag when it is going to the true root, or by checking that the page has no siblings when going to the fast root. At worst, this could result in descending some extra tree levels if we have a cached pointer to a fast root that is now above the real fast root. Such cases shouldn't arise often enough to be worth optimizing; and in any case we can expect a relcache flush will discard the cached metapage before long, since a VACUUM that's moved the fast root pointer can be expected to issue a statistics update for the index. The algorithm assumes we can fit at least three items per page (a "high key" and two real data items). Therefore it's unsafe to accept items larger than 1/3rd page size. Larger items would work sometimes, but could cause failures later on depending on what else gets put on their page. "ScanKey" data structures are used in two fundamentally different ways in this code, which we describe as "search" scankeys and "insertion" scankeys. A search scankey is the kind passed to btbeginscan() or btrescan() from outside the btree code. The sk_func pointers in a search scankey point to comparison functions that return boolean, such as int4lt. There might be more than one scankey entry for a given index column, or none at all. (We require the keys to appear in index column order, but the order of multiple keys for a given column is unspecified.) An insertion scankey uses the same array-of-ScanKey data structure, but the sk_func pointers point to btree comparison support functions (ie, 3-way comparators that return int4 values interpreted as <0, =0, >0). In an insertion scankey there is exactly one entry per index column. Insertion scankeys are built within the btree code (eg, by _bt_mkscankey()) and are used to locate the starting point of a scan, as well as for locating the place to insert a new index tuple. (Note: in the case of an insertion scankey built from a search scankey, there might be fewer keys than index columns, indicating that we have no constraints for the remaining index columns.) After we have located the starting point of a scan, the original search scankey is consulted as each index entry is sequentially scanned to decide whether to return the entry and whether the scan can stop (see _bt_checkkeys()). Notes About Data Representation ------------------------------- The right-sibling link required by L&Y is kept in the page "opaque data" area, as is the left-sibling link, the page level, and some flags. The page level counts upwards from zero at the leaf level, to the tree depth minus 1 at the root. (Counting up from the leaves ensures that we don't need to renumber any existing pages when splitting the root.) The Postgres disk block data format (an array of items) doesn't fit Lehman and Yao's alternating-keys-and-pointers notion of a disk page, so we have to play some games. On a page that is not rightmost in its tree level, the "high key" is kept in the page's first item, and real data items start at item 2. The link portion of the "high key" item goes unused. A page that is rightmost has no "high key", so data items start with the first item. Putting the high key at the left, rather than the right, may seem odd, but it avoids moving the high key as we add data items. On a leaf page, the data items are simply links to (TIDs of) tuples in the relation being indexed, with the associated key values. On a non-leaf page, the data items are down-links to child pages with bounding keys. The key in each data item is the *lower* bound for keys on that child page, so logically the key is to the left of that downlink. The high key (if present) is the upper bound for the last downlink. The first data item on each such page has no lower bound --- or lower bound of minus infinity, if you prefer. The comparison routines must treat it accordingly. The actual key stored in the item is irrelevant, and need not be stored at all. This arrangement corresponds to the fact that an L&Y non-leaf page has one more pointer than key. Notes to Operator Class Implementors ------------------------------------ With this implementation, we require each supported combination of datatypes to supply us with a comparison procedure via pg_amproc. This procedure must take two nonnull values A and B and return an int32 < 0, 0, or > 0 if A < B, A = B, or A > B, respectively. The procedure must not return INT_MIN for "A < B", since the value may be negated before being tested for sign. A null result is disallowed, too. See nbtcompare.c for examples. There are some basic assumptions that a btree operator family must satisfy: An = operator must be an equivalence relation; that is, for all non-null values A,B,C of the datatype: A = A is true reflexive law if A = B, then B = A symmetric law if A = B and B = C, then A = C transitive law A < operator must be a strong ordering relation; that is, for all non-null values A,B,C: A < A is false irreflexive law if A < B and B < C, then A < C transitive law Furthermore, the ordering is total; that is, for all non-null values A,B: exactly one of A < B, A = B, and B < A is true trichotomy law (The trichotomy law justifies the definition of the comparison support procedure, of course.) The other three operators are defined in terms of these two in the obvious way, and must act consistently with them. For an operator family supporting multiple datatypes, the above laws must hold when A,B,C are taken from any datatypes in the family. The transitive laws are the trickiest to ensure, as in cross-type situations they represent statements that the behaviors of two or three different operators are consistent. As an example, it would not work to put float8 and numeric into an opfamily, at least not with the current semantics that numerics are converted to float8 for comparison to a float8. Because of the limited accuracy of float8, this means there are distinct numeric values that will compare equal to the same float8 value, and thus the transitive law fails. It should be fairly clear why a btree index requires these laws to hold within a single datatype: without them there is no ordering to arrange the keys with. Also, index searches using a key of a different datatype require comparisons to behave sanely across two datatypes. The extensions to three or more datatypes within a family are not strictly required by the btree index mechanism itself, but the planner relies on them for optimization purposes.