Re: interval_ops shall stop using btequalimage (deduplication)

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 11:21:20PM -0700, Donghang Lin wrote:
> > I've also caught btree posting lists where one TID refers to a '1d' heap
> > tuple, while another TID refers to a '24h' heap tuple.  amcheck complains.
> Index-only scans can return the '1d' bits where the actual tuple had the
> '24h'
> bits.
> 
> Have a build without the patch. I can't reproduce amcheck complaints in
> release mode
> where all these statements succeed.

The queries I shared don't create the problematic structure, just an assertion
failure.

> >  * Generic "equalimage" support function.
> > *
> > * B-Tree operator classes whose equality function could safely be
> replaced by
> > * datum_image_eq() in all cases can use this as their "equalimage" support
> > * function.
> It seems to me that as long as a data type has a deterministic sort but not
> necessarily be equalimage,
> it should be able to support deduplication.  e.g for interval type, we add
> a byte wise tie breaker
> after '24h' and '1day' are compared equally. In the btree, '24h' and '1day'
> are still adjacent,
> '1day' is always sorted before '24h' in a btree page, can we do dedup for
> each value
> without problem?

Yes.  I'm not aware of correctness obstacles arising if one did that.