Ah, thanks! I had forgotten about it as well.
Bruce Momjian wrote:
[ Sorry I found this one only found recently.]
Your patch has been added to the PostgreSQL unapplied patches list at:
http://momjian.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/pgpatches
It will be applied as soon as one of the PostgreSQL committers reviews
and approves it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
While thinking about index-organized-tables and similar ideas, it
occurred to me that there's some low-hanging-fruit: maintaining cluster
order on inserts by trying to place new heap tuples close to other
similar tuples. That involves asking the index am where on the heap the
new tuple should go, and trying to insert it there before using the FSM.
Using the new fillfactor parameter makes it more likely that there's
room on the page. We don't worry about the order within the page.
The API I'm thinking of introduces a new optional index am function,
amsuggestblock (suggestions for a better name are welcome). It gets the
same parameters as aminsert, and returns the heap block number that
would be optimal place to put the new tuple. It's be called from
ExecInsert before inserting the heap tuple, and the suggestion is passed
on to heap_insert and RelationGetBufferForTuple.
I wrote a little patch to implement this for btree, attached.
This could be optimized by changing the existing aminsert API, because
as it is, an insert will have to descend the btree twice. Once in
amsuggestblock and then in aminsert. amsuggestblock could keep the right
index page pinned so aminsert could locate it quicker. But I wanted to
keep this simple for now. Another improvement might be to allow
amsuggestblock to return a list of suggestions, but that makes it more
expensive to insert if there isn't room in the suggested pages, since
heap_insert will have to try them all before giving up.
Comments regarding the general idea or the patch? There should probably
be a index option to turn the feature on and off. You'll want to turn it
off when you first load a table, and turn it on after CLUSTER to keep it
clustered.
Since there's been discussion on keeping the TODO list more up-to-date,
I hereby officially claim the "Automatically maintain clustering on a
table" TODO item :). Feel free to bombard me with requests for status
reports. And just to be clear, I'm not trying to sneak this into 8.2
anymore, this is 8.3 stuff.
I won't be implementing a background daemon described on the TODO item,
since that would essentially be an online version of CLUSTER. Which sure
would be nice, but that's a different story.
- Heikki
--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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