Re: Minmax indexes

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 4:51 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <hlinnakangas@vmware.com> wrote:
>> Implementing something is a good way to demonstrate how it would look like.
>> But no, I don't insist on implementing every possible design whenever a new
>> feature is proposed.
>>
>> I liked Greg's sketch of what the opclass support functions would be. It
>> doesn't seem significantly more complicated than what's in the patch now.
>
> As a counter-point to my own point there will be nothing stopping us
> in the future from generalizing things. Dealing with catalogs is
> mostly book-keeping headaches and careful work. it's something that
> might be well-suited for a GSOC or first patch from someone looking to
> familiarize themselves with the system architecture. It's hard to
> invent a whole new underlying infrastructure at the same time as
> dealing with all that book-keeping and it's hard for someone
> familiarizing themselves with the system to also have a great new
> idea. Having tasks like this that are easy to explain and that mentor
> understands well can be easier to manage than tasks where the newcomer
> has some radical new idea.

Generalizing this in the future would be highly likely to change the
on-disk format for existing indexes, which would be a problem for
pg_upgrade.  I think we will likely be stuck with whatever the initial
on-disk format looks like for a very long time, which is why I think
we need to try rather hard to get this right the first time.

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