BRIN is a new index access method intended to accelerate scans of very
large tables, without the maintenance overhead of btrees or other
traditional indexes. They work by maintaining "summary" data about
block ranges. Bitmap index scans work by reading each summary tuple and
comparing them with the query quals; all pages in the range are returned
in a lossy TID bitmap if the quals are consistent with the values in the
summary tuple, otherwise not. Normal index scans are not supported
because these indexes do not store TIDs.
As new tuples are added into the index, the summary information is
updated (if the block range in which the tuple is added is already
summarized) or not; in the latter case, a subsequent pass of VACUUM or
the brin_summarize_new_values() function will create the summary
information.
For data types with natural 1-D sort orders, the summary info consists
of the maximum and the minimum values of each indexed column within each
page range. This type of operator class we call "Minmax", and we
supply a bunch of them for most data types with B-tree opclasses.
Since the BRIN code is generalized, other approaches are possible for
things such as arrays, geometric types, ranges, etc; even for things
such as enum types we could do something different than minmax with
better results. In this commit I only include minmax.
Catalog version bumped due to new builtin catalog entries.
There's more that could be done here, but this is a good step forwards.
Loosely based on ideas from Simon Riggs; code mostly by Álvaro Herrera,
with contribution by Heikki Linnakangas.
Patch reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas.
Testing help from Jeff Janes, Erik Rijkers, Emanuel Calvo.
PS:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n° 318633.
Prominent binaries already had this metadata. A handful of minor
binaries, such as pg_regress.exe, still lack it; efforts to eliminate
such exceptions are welcome.
Michael Paquier, reviewed by MauMau.
Remove use of PageSetTLI() from all page manipulation functions
and adjust README to indicate change in the way we make changes
to pages. Repurpose those bytes into the pd_checksum field and
explain how that works in comments about page header.
Refactoring ahead of actual feature patch which would make use
of the checksum field, arriving later.
Jeff Davis, with comments and doc changes by Simon Riggs
Direction suggested by Robert Haas; many others providing
review comments.
This isn't fully tested as yet, in particular I'm not sure that the
"foo--unpackaged--1.0.sql" scripts are OK. But it's time to get some
buildfarm cycles on it.
sepgsql is not converted to an extension, mainly because it seems to
require a very nonstandard installation process.
Dimitri Fontaine and Tom Lane
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
installations whose pg_config program does not appear first in the PATH.
Per gripe from Eddie Stanley and subsequent discussions with Fabien Coelho
and others.
