Re: GIN improvements part 1: additional information

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 01:14:45PM +0400, Alexander Korotkov wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakangas@vmware.com>
> wrote:
> 
>     There's a few open questions:
> 
>     1. How are we going to handle pg_upgrade? It would be nice to be able to
>     read the old page format, or convert on-the-fly. OTOH, if it gets too
>     complicated, might not be worth it. The indexes are much smaller with the
>     patch, so anyone using GIN probably wants to rebuild them anyway, sooner or
>     later. Still, I'd like to give it a shot.

We have broken pg_upgrade index compatibility in the past. 
Specifically, hash and GIN index binary format changed from PG 8.3 to
8.4.  I handled it by invalidating the indexes and providing a
post-upgrade script to REINDEX all the changed indexes.  The user
message is:
   Your installation contains hash and/or GIN indexes.  These indexes have   different internal formats between your
oldand new clusters, so they   must be reindexed with the REINDEX command.  The file:
 
   ...
   when executed by psql by the database superuser will recreate all invalid      indexes; until then, none of these
indexeswill be used.
 

It would be very easy to do this from a pg_upgrade perspective. 
However, I know there has been complaints from others about making
pg_upgrade more restrictive.

In this specific case, even if you write code to read the old file
format, we might want to create the REINDEX script to allow _optional_
reindexing to shrink the index files.

If we do require the REINDEX, --check will clearly warn the user that
this will be required.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +