But the performance difference is hardly as severe as I gather it can be if you neglect to vacuum.
As for SQL Server being a 'single-user database' ... ummm ... no, I don't think so. I'm REALLY happy to be shut of the Microsoft world, but MSSQL 7/2000/2005 is a serious big DB engine. It also has some serious bright heads behind it. They hired Goetz Graefe and Paul (aka Per-Ake) Larsen away from academia, and it shows, in the join and aggregate processing. I'll be a happy camper if I manage to contribute something
to PG that honks the way their stuff does. Happy to discuss, too.
Josh Berkus wrote:
Bruce,
How do vendors actually implement auto-clustering? I assume they move rows around during quiet periods or have lots of empty space in each value bucket.
That's how SQL Server does it. In old versions (6.5) you had to manually send commands to update the cluster, same as PG. Also, when you create a cluster (or an index or table for that matter) you can manually set an amount of "space" to be held open on each data page for updates.
Also keep in mind that SQL Server, as a "single-user database" has a much easier time with this. They don't have to hold several versions of an index in memory and collapse it into a single version at commit time.
All that being said, we could do a better job of "auto-balancing" clustered tables. I believe that someone was working on this in Hackers through what they called "B-Tree Tables". What happened to that?
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