Re: Reverse Key Index - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Thomas Kellerer
Subject Re: Reverse Key Index
Date
Msg-id mcn4m4$o9b$1@ger.gmane.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Reverse Key Index  ("Sven R. Kunze" <srkunze@tbz-pariv.de>)
Responses Re: Reverse Key Index  ("Sven R. Kunze" <srkunze@tbz-pariv.de>)
List pgsql-performance
Sven R. Kunze schrieb am 26.02.2015 um 13:23:
> If you think Reverse Key Indexes have no usage here in PostgreSQL, you should not support convenience features
> for easily improving performance without breaking the querying API

It's also unclear to me which "performance" you are referring to.
Insert performance? Retrieval performance? Concurrency?

The use-case for reverse indexes in Oracle is pretty small: it's _only_ about the contention when doing a lot of
insertswith increasing numbers (because the different transactions will be blocked when accessing the blocks in
question). 

As Postgres manages inserts differently than Oracle I'm not so sure that this problem exists in Postgres the same way
itdoes in Oracle. 
That's why I asked if you have a _specific_ problem.

Richard Footes blog post is mostly about the myth that _if_ you have a reverse index this is only used for equality
operations. 
It does not claim that a reverse index is faster than a regular index _if_ it is used for a range scan.

The question is: do you think you need a reverse index because you have a performance problem with when doing many,
manyinserts at the same time using "close-by" values into a table that uses a btree index on the column?  

Or do you think you need a reverse index to improve the performance of a range scan? If that is the then you can easily
usa gin/gist index or even a simple btree index using a trigram index to speed up a "LIKE '%abc%'" (something Oracle
can'tdo at all) without having to worry about obfuscation layers (aka ORM). 

Thomas




pgsql-performance by date:

Previous
From: Heikki Linnakangas
Date:
Subject: Re: Reverse Key Index
Next
From: "Sven R. Kunze"
Date:
Subject: Re: Reverse Key Index