Re: Block B-Tree concept

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Couldn't vacuum just eliminate tuples marked dead? Heck, don't we do
> that anyway right now?

You mean _index_ tuples marked dead? Sure, no problem there.

> Granted, you'd want to periodically ensure that you scan the entire
> index, but that shouldn't be horribly hard to set up.

Well, it seems to be.  A vacuum can't evaluate index expressions because 
it's not in a real transaction.

The DBA could set up a cron job to do "SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar > 0" 
etc. with enable_seqscan=false? That would work, but we can't depend on 
an additional administrative task like. And we might as well just 
disable the optimization that's causing us problems.

-- 
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com