Re: Minmax indexes

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:55 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> On 08/05/2014 04:41 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> I have chosen to keep the name "minmax", even if the opclasses now let
>> one implement completely different things on top of it such as geometry
>> bounding boxes and bloom filters (aka bitmap indexes).  I don't see a
>> need for a rename: essentially, in PR we can just say "we have these
>> neat minmax indexes that other databases also have, but instead of just
>> being used for integer data, they can also be used for geometry, GIS and
>> bitmap indexes, so as always we're more powerful than everyone else when
>> implementing new database features".
>
> Plus we haven't come up with a better name ...

Several good suggestions have been made, like "summarizing" or
"summary" indexes and "compressed range" indexes.  I still really
dislike the present name - you might think this is a type of index
that has something to do with optimizing "min" and "max", but what it
really is is a kind of small index for a big table.  The current name
couldn't make that less clear.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company