Re: WIP: BRIN multi-range indexes

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
To: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: John Naylor <john.naylor@2ndquadrant.com>, pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-09-10T20:01:37Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 2020-Sep-10, Tomas Vondra wrote:

> I've spent a bit of time experimenting with this. My idea was to allow
> keeping an "expanded" version of the summary somewhere. As the addValue
> function only receives BrinValues I guess one option would be to just
> add bv_mem_values field. Or do you have a better idea?

Maybe it's okay to pass the BrinMemTuple to the add_value function, and
keep something there.  Or maybe that's pointless and just a new field in
BrinValues is okay.

> Of course, more would need to be done:
> 
> 1) We'd need to also pass the right memory context (bt_context seems
> like the right thing, but that's not something addValue sees now).

You could use GetMemoryChunkContext() for that.

> 2) We'd also need to specify some sort of callback that serializes the
> in-memory value into bt_values. That's not something addValue can do,
> because it doesn't know whether it's the last value in the range etc. I
> guess one option would be to add yet another support proc, but I guess a
> simple callback would be enough.

Hmm.

> I've hacked together an experimental version of this to see how much
> would it help, and it reduces the duration from ~4.6s to ~3.3s. Which is
> nice, but plain minmax is ~1.1s. I suppose there's room for further
> improvements in compare_combine_ranges/reduce_combine_ranges and so on,
> but I still think there'll always be a gap compared to plain minmax.

The main reason I'm talking about desupporting plain minmax is that,
even if it's amazingly fast, it loses quite quickly in real-world cases
because of loss of correlation.  Minmax's build time is pretty much
determined by speed at which you can seqscan the table.  I don't think
we lose much if we add overhead in order to create an index that is 100x
more useful.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services



Commits

  1. BRIN minmax-multi indexes

  2. BRIN bloom indexes

  3. Support the old signature of BRIN consistent function

  4. Remove unnecessary pg_amproc BRIN minmax entries

  5. Optimize allocations in bringetbitmap

  6. Move IS [NOT] NULL handling from BRIN support functions

  7. Pass all scan keys to BRIN consistent function at once

  8. Properly detoast data in brin_form_tuple