Re: Dead Space Map

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 03:05:41PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:
> > On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> This strikes me as a fairly bad idea, because it makes VACUUM dependent
> >> on correct functioning of user-written code --- consider a functional
> >> index involving a user-written function that was claimed to be immutable
> >> and is not.
> 
> > If the user-defined function is broken, you're in more or less trouble 
> > anyway.
> 
> Less.  A non-immutable function might result in lookup failures (not
> finding the row you need) but not in database corruption, which is what
> would ensue if VACUUM fails to remove an index tuple.  The index entry
> would eventually point to a wrong table entry, after the table item slot
> gets recycled for another tuple.
Is there some (small) metadata that could be stored in the index to
protect against this, perhaps XID? Granted, it's another 4 bytes, but it
would only need to be in functional indexes. And there could still be a
means to turn it off, if you're 100% certain that the function is
immutable. lower() is probably the biggest use-case here...

> Moreover, you haven't pointed to any strong reason to adopt this
> methodology.  It'd only be a win when vacuuming pretty small numbers
> of tuples, which is not the design center for VACUUM, and isn't likely
> to be the case in practice either if you're using autovacuum.  If you're
> removing say 1% of the tuples, you are likely to be hitting every index
> page to do it, meaning that the scan approach will be significantly
> *more* efficient than retail lookups.

The use case is any large table that sees updates in 'hot spots'.
Anything that's based on current time is a likely candidate, since often
most activity only concerns the past few days of data.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461