Hannu Krosing wrote:
Ühel kenal päeval, K, 2007-03-14 kell 10:22, kirjutas Heikki
Linnakangas:
Clustered indexes have roughly the same performance effect and use cases as clustered indexes on MS SQL Server, and Index-Organized-Tables on Oracle, but the way I've implemented them is significantly different. On other DBMSs, the index and heap are combined to a single b-tree structure. The way I've implemented them is less invasive, there's no changes to the heap for example, and it doesn't require moving live tuples.

Do you keep visibility info in the index ?

No.

If there is no visibility data in index, then I can't see, how it gets
the same performance effect as Index-Organized-Tables, as lot of random
heap access is still needed.

Let me illustrate the effect in the best case, with a table that consists of just the key:

Normal b-tree:

Root -> leaf -> heap

aaa -> aaa -> aaa
       bbb -> bbb
       ccc -> ccc
ddd -> ddd -> ddd
       eee -> eee
       fff -> fff
ggg -> ggg -> ggg
       hhh -> hhh
       iii -> iii

Clustered b-tree:

Root -> heap

aaa -> aaa
       bbb
       ccc
ddd -> ddd
       eee
       fff
ggg -> ggg
       hhh
       iii

The index is much smaller, one level shallower in the best case. A smaller index means that more of it fits in cache. If you're doing random access through the index, that means that you need to do less I/O because you don't need to fetch so many index pages. You need to access the heap anyway for the visibility information, as you pointed out, but the savings are coming from having to do less index I/O.

How close to the best case do you get in practice? It depends on your schema, narrow tables or tables with wide keys gain the most, and on the clusteredness of the table.

--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

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