Re: Reducing relation locking overhead

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> It was a *major* new feature that many people were waiting for when Oracle
> finally implemented live CREATE INDEX and REINDEX. The ability to run create
> an index without blocking any operations on a table, even updates, was
> absolutely critical for 24x7 operation.

Well, we're still not in *that* ballpark and I haven't seen any serious
proposals to make us so.  How "absolutely critical" is it really?
Is REINDEX-in-parallel-with-reads-but-not-writes, which is what we
actually have at the moment, an "absolutely critical" facility?
        regards, tom lane