Re: Covering Indexes - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From David E. Wheeler
Subject Re: Covering Indexes
Date
Msg-id 6F6BA247-3BAD-4906-B95B-751B604BA64E@justatheory.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Covering Indexes  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com>)
Responses Re: Covering Indexes
Re: Covering Indexes
Re: Covering Indexes
List pgsql-hackers
On Jul 17, 2012, at 5:32 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:

>  CREATE INDEX ON foo (a, b, c, d);
>
> allows
>
>  SELECT c, d FROM foo WHERE a = ? AND b = ?
>
> to use an index only scan.
>
> The phrase "unindexed" seems misleading since the data is clearly in
> the index from the description on the URL you gave. And since the
> index is non-unique, I don't see any gap between Postgres and
> SQLliite4.

Yeah, but that index is unnecessarily big if one will never use c or d in the search. The nice thing about covering
indexesas described for SQLite 4 and implemented in MSSQL is that you can specify additional columns that just come
alongfor the ride, but are not part of the indexed data: 
   CREATE INDEX cover1 ON table1(a,b) COVERING(c,d);

Yes, you can do that by also indexing c and d as of 9.2, but it might be nice to be able to include them in the index
asadditional row data without actually indexing them. 

Best,

David

pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Simon Riggs
Date:
Subject: Re: Covering Indexes
Next
From: Simon Riggs
Date:
Subject: Re: Covering Indexes