Hi, after getting GiST works we're trying to use RD-Tree in our fulltext search application. We have universe of lexems (words in dictionaries) which is rather large, so we need some compression to effectively use RD-Tree. When we did index support for int arrays we compressed set by range sets but it's not applicable if cardinality of universe set is very high. We're thinking about algorithm of creating good signature for set of integers. This signature must follow several rules: 1). if set A is contained in set B, then sig(A) is also contained in sig(B) 2). if set C is a union of set A and set B, then sig(C) is union of sig(A) and sig(B) Also, signature should be good for effective tree construction (RD-Tree), i.e. it should be not degenerated for set size about 10^6 . We need 1) for search operation and 2) for tree contructing. Right now we implementing so-called "superimposed coding" technique (D. Knuth, vol.3) which is based on idea to hash attribute values into random k-bit codes in a b-bit field and to superimpose the codes for each attribute value in a record. This technique was proposed by Sven Helmer ("Index Structures for Databases Containing Data Items with Set-valued Attr ibutes",1997, Sven Helmer, paper is available from my gist page) to represent sets in the index structures. This technique is great because of fixed length and great speed of calculation (used only bit operations). It follows rules 1 and 2, but it's not good for big sets, because for internal nodes and especially for root (a union of sets) we get signature fully consisting of 1. We couldn't use arbitrarily long signature, because we have 8Kb limit of index page size. For signature of variable size length we don't know how to define 1) and 2) While we 're investigating the problem, I'd be glad to know some references, ideas. Regards, Oleg _____________________________________________________________ Oleg Bartunov, sci.researcher, hostmaster of AstroNet, Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University (Russia) Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/ phone: +007(095)939-16-83, +007(095)939-23-83