Thanks to Tom Lane and Jeff Janes for chiming in with the level of detail they're able to provide.
As an outsider-who-now-loves-Postgres, I don't know the history or deep details of all of the various index types. (Obviously.) As a long-time database programmer, I can say that low-cardinality fields are *very* common cases. So whatever Postgres can offer to make for optimal searches and aggregates on such columns would be of immediate, ongoing, and widespread value.
As an example, we're dealing with millions of rows where we often want to find or summarize by a category value. So, maybe 6-10 categories that are used in various queries. It's not realistic for us to anticipate every field combination the category field is going to be involved in to lay down multi-column indexes everywhere.
I've used a system that handled this situation with a B-tree for the distinct values, and a subordinate data structure for the associated key (TIDs in PG, I guess.) They either stored a packed list of addresses, or a compressed bitmap on the whole table, depending on the number of associated entries. Seemed to work pretty well for queries. That also sounds very like a btree_gin index in Postgres. (Without the compressed, on-disk bitmap option.)
Getting back to the day-to-day, what would you recommend using for a single-column index on a low-cardinality column (really low)? And, yes, we'll happily use blocking queries up front to reduce the number of rows under inspection, but that's 1) not always possible and 2) definitely not always predictable in advance. So I'm looking for the best case for stupid searches ;-)
