Re: Write Ahead Logging for Hash Indexes

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 1:40 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> Great!  I've committed the latest version of the patch, with some
>> cosmetic changes.
>
> Woo hoo!  That's been a bee in the bonnet for, um, decades.

Yeah.  I'm pretty happy to see that go in.

It's become pretty clear to me that there are a bunch of other things
about hash indexes which are not exactly great, the worst of which is
the way they grow by DOUBLING IN SIZE.  Mithun has submitted a patch
which - if it's acceptable - would alleviate that to some degree by
splitting up each doubling into four separate increments.  But that
still could lead to very large growth increments on big indexes, like
your 32GB index suddenly growing - in one fell swoop - to 40GB.
That's admittedly a lot better than what will happen right now, which
is instantaneous growth to 64GB, but it's not great, and it's not
altogether clear how it could be fixed in a really satisfying way.

Other things that are not so great:

- no multi-column support
- no amcanunique support
- every insert dirties the metapage
- splitting is generally too aggressive; very few overflow pages are
ever created unless you have piles of duplicates

Still, this is a big step forward.  I think it will be useful for
people with long text strings or other very wide data that they want
to index, and hopefully we'll get some feedback from users about where
this works well and where it doesn't.

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