Re: WIP: RangeTypes

David Wheeler <david@kineticode.com>

From: "David E. Wheeler" <david@kineticode.com>
To: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>
Cc: David Fetter <david@fetter.org>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2011-01-29T19:00:42Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Jan 29, 2011, at 10:57 AM, Jeff Davis wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 10:41 -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote:
>> +1 in principal. I think we should try to avoid the user of the term
>> "period" if possible, and I see definite benefits to a simple model of
>> $typename . 'range';
> 
> Interesting, I didn't realize that PERIOD was such an undesirable type
> name.

It's not *hugely* undesirable. I just tend to think that "range" is more so.

>> Is there GIN support? GIN seems to be the preferred index type for
>> this sort of thing, no?
> 
> GiST is the natural index access method if we approach ranges as a
> spatial type. I don't quite know what you have in mind for GIN; what
> keys would you extract from the value '[1.23,4.56)' ?

I think I'm just revealing my ignorance of these index types and what they're good for. My impression has been that GIN was a better but less-full-featured alternative to GiST and getting better with Tom's recent fixes for its handling of NULLs. But, uh, obviously not.

Best,

David