On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 2:17 PM Peter Geoghegan <p...@bowt.ie> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 11:04 AM Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I think I may pursue a different approach to the problem that led me > > to think about this, at least for the moment. But I'm still curious > > about the general question: if somebody showed up with a well-written > > patch that added a GIN index to a system catalog, would that > > potentially be acceptable, or DOA? > > Surely it would depend on the use case. Is this just an intellectual > exercise, or do you actually plan on doing something like this, in > whatever way? For example, does the posting list compression seem like > it might offer a compelling trade-off for some system catalog indexes > over and above B-Tree deduplication? > > I'm asking this (at least in part) because it affects the answer. Lots > of stuff that GIN does that seems like it would be particularly tricky > to integrate with a system catalog is non-essential. It could be (and > sometimes is) selectively disabled. Whereas B-Tree indexes don't > really have any optional features (you can disable deduplication > selectively, but I believe that approximately nobody ever found it > useful to do so).
My interest was in being able to index operators that GIN can index and btree cannot. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
