> Which is roughly what Simon's original "Dynamic Partitioning" would be
> if it became visible at the planner level (unless I've misunderstood). I
> was picturing it in my head as a two-dimensional bitmap with
> value-ranges along one axis and block-ranges along the other. Of course,
> unlike other indexes it needs visibility information to be of any use.
But why not have it as a normal index of ranges ? I'm not familiar with
the GIST extensions, but this sounds like a set of records (segments in
Simon's terms) indexed by their interval position on a line... isn't
that covered by some GIST index type ?
> Thinking about it, I'm not sure how my thinking would affect a
> full-table seq-scan. You'd not get blocks back in-order throughout the
> scan - would that matter?
That could be covered by something like the bitmap scan, just on coarser
level, the bits covering segments instead of blocks.
Cheers,
Csaba.