Re: Planner question - "bit" data types - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Bruce Momjian
Subject Re: Planner question - "bit" data types
Date
Msg-id 200909180229.n8I2T8q07981@momjian.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Planner question - "bit" data types  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
Responses Re: Planner question - "bit" data types
Re: Planner question - "bit" data types
List pgsql-performance
Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Karl Denninger escribi?:
>
> > The individual boolean fields don't kill me and in terms of some of the
> > application issues they're actually rather easy to code for.
> >
> > The problem with re-coding for them is extensibility (by those who
> > install and administer the package); a mask leaves open lots of extra
> > bits for "site-specific" use, where hard-coding booleans does not, and
> > since the executable is a binary it instantly becomes a huge problem for
> > everyone but me.
>
> Did you try hiding the bitmask operations inside a function as Tom
> suggested?

Yes.  In addition, functions that are part of expression indexes do get
their own optimizer statistics, so it does allow you to get optimizer
stats for your test without having to use booleans.

I see this documented in the 8.0 release notes:

     * "ANALYZE" now collects statistics for expression indexes (Tom)
       Expression indexes (also called functional indexes) allow users
       to index not just columns but the results of expressions and
       function calls. With this release, the optimizer can gather and
       use statistics about the contents of expression indexes. This will
       greatly improve the quality of planning for queries in which an
       expression index is relevant.

Is this in our main documentation somewhere?

--
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +

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