Thread: GIN and GiST index - more in depth info

Hi everybody,

actually I am wondering if anybody can give me some links to a more in depth info
concerning the GIN and GiST index. After having read the docu and searching the web for
more info, I am still not satisfied with the knowledge I have.

For sure I had a look to Oleg Bartunov' s and Teodor Sigaev's website at
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/wiki/ but for me it's still not clear how to describe the
differences between the indexes and the usage scenarios when to use GIN or GiST.

Every info is higly appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

--
Netzmeister St.Pauli

St.Pauli - Hamburg - Germany

Andreas Wenk


http://www.netzmeister-st-pauli.de
http://blog.netzmeister-st-pauli.de
mailto:a.wenk@netzmeister-st-pauli.de

> For sure I had a look to Oleg Bartunov' s and Teodor Sigaev's
> website at http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/wiki/ but for me
> it's still not clear how to describe the differences between
> the indexes and the usage scenarios when to use GIN or GiST.

As far as I understand it's a matter of usage scenario. GIN is extremely
slow on updates, I seem to remember somewhere that it's actually often
better to simply recreate the complete index than to update it; GiST's
write performance is not half as bad. On the other hand, GIN is much
faster on reads than GiST. If you've got some data that is read-only in
nature, you'll probably fare better with GIN. If you need frequent
updates, GiST ist the better choice. In certain scenarios you would use
partial indexes to have a GiST index on current, still heavily updated
data, and a GIN index on older, "archived" rows which are not updated
any longer.

Kind regards

   Markus

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