Re: Metadata and record block access stats for indexes - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Mircea Cadariu
Subject Re: Metadata and record block access stats for indexes
Date
Msg-id 33bcd7b1-899b-415f-82bd-27f710bcc0ee@gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Metadata and record block access stats for indexes  (Aleksander Alekseev <aleksander@tigerdata.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Hi, Aleksander!

On 20/11/2025 14:56, Aleksander Alekseev wrote:
> Hi Mircea,
>
>> Rebased and dusted off this patch.
> Thanks for the patch. Here are my two cents.
>
> IMO it would be helpful if you could come up with a few more practical
> use cases. This change is going to affect pretty much everyone. If
> only a few users will benefit from it once in several years, the value
> of the patch is arguably low. As an example, can you think of how the
> new counters can be used for debugging, checking index integrity,
> writing new access methods or perhaps writing property-based tests?
> Just several examples that came to my mind first.
>
> Also I'm a bit concerned about the performance impact. It's probably
> next to nothing, but if you could measure it on a relatively large
> amount of data that would be great. Note that it's not uncommon to
> have dozens of different indexes for a single table.
>
Thanks! It hasn't caught on, might just stay an educational exercise on 
my side on patch writing and we move on. Thanks for thinking out loud, 
your ideas lead me to this: when working on improving the performance of 
index traversals, it could be a direct way to show improvement and even 
write regression tests: lower amount of internal pages are read than 
before. But, one could also just use the existing stats and still be 
able to track this..

For the performance checks, indeed, I'm using this script, I observe 
no meaningful difference on my laptop: 
https://gist.github.com/mcadariu/fc4a6d4eccd56b4447d1d9d05f9b5d79.

-- 
Thanks,
Mircea Cadariu




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