Re: Experiences of PostgreSQL on-disk bitmap index patch - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Ron Johnson
Subject Re: Experiences of PostgreSQL on-disk bitmap index patch
Date
Msg-id 4689C509.6040308@cox.net
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Experiences of PostgreSQL on-disk bitmap index patch  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-general
On 06/25/07 09:58, Tom Lane wrote:
[snip]
>
> The fly in the ointment is that if the column value is so high
> cardinality as all that, it's questionable whether you want an index
> search at all rather than just seqscanning; and it's definite that
> the index access cost will be only a fraction of the heap access cost.
> So the prospects for actual net performance gain are a lot less than
> the index-size argument makes them look.

Well they definitely are for data warehouses, in which many
high-cardinality columns each have an index.

Because of their small disk size, ANDing them is fast and winnows
down the result set.  That's the theory, of course.

--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!


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