Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Pavan Deolasee
Subject Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)
Date
Msg-id CABOikdOxQMf13iarwNLxRuPa4k4pAxrWV+mWrjsGGu0x3JKzmg@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)  (Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)  (Pavan Deolasee <pavan.deolasee@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-hackers


On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 6:46 PM, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:


I was worried for the case if the index is created non-default
collation, will the datumIsEqual() suffice the need.  Now again
thinking about it, I think it will because in the index tuple we are
storing the value as in heap tuple.  However today it occurred to me
how will this work for toasted index values (index value >
TOAST_INDEX_TARGET).  It is mentioned on top of datumIsEqual() that it
probably won't work for toasted values.  Have you considered that
point?


No, I haven't and thanks for bringing that up. And now that I think more about it and see the code, I think the naive way of just comparing index attribute value against heap values is probably wrong. The example of TOAST_INDEX_TARGET is one such case, but I wonder if there are other varlena attributes that we might store differently in heap and index. Like index_form_tuple() ->heap_fill_tuple seem to some churning for varlena. It's not clear to me if index_get_attr will return the values which are binary comparable to heap values.. I wonder if calling index_form_tuple on the heap values, fetching attributes via index_get_attr on both index tuples and then doing a binary compare is a more robust idea. Or may be that's just duplicating efforts.

While looking at this problem, it occurred to me that the assumptions made for hash indexes are also wrong :-( Hash index has the same problem as expression indexes have. A change in heap value may not necessarily cause a change in the hash key. If we don't detect that, we will end up having two hash identical hash keys with the same TID pointer. This will cause the duplicate key scans problem since hashrecheck will return true for both the hash entries. That's a bummer as far as supporting WARM for hash indexes is concerned, unless we find a way to avoid duplicate index entries. 

Thanks,
Pavan

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 Pavan Deolasee                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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