Re: ACM Sigmod interview with Bruce Lindsay

Mike Mascari wrote:
> I find this Q & A a bit amusing:
>
> http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p71-column-winslet.pdf
>
> ----
>
> Q. If you magically had enough extra time to do one additional thing at
> work that you're not doing now, what would it be?
>
> A. I think I would work on indexing a little harder.
>
> Q. What aspect of indexing?
>
> A. Oh, there are many aspects of indexing that I think need improvement.
> I think we can do a better job in the searching. I think there are
> exciting things to do in multi-dimensional indexing. I think there are a
> lot more advanced ways that we can use database indexes for indexing on
> columns that contain sequences or XML data, and for partial indexing.
> With partial indexing, we would index only some of the rows, based on
> some predicate. For example, we might not index the NULL values, or we
> might index only those salaries greater than $100K.
>
> ----
>
> How long has a partial index implementation been in PostgreSQL? I seem
> to recall it being brought up to speed around six years ago. The
> underlying code may have been in there for much, much longer...

We have had partial indexes since the Berkeley days, per-1996, but we
have improved them quite a bit.

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