Re: [HACKERS] [WIP] Effective storage of duplicates in B-tree index.

On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 8:09 AM Alexander Korotkov
<a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
> BTW, I think deduplication could cause some small performance
> degradation in some particular cases, because page-level locks became
> more coarse grained once pages hold more tuples.  However, this
> doesn't seem like something we should much care about.  Providing an
> option to turn deduplication off looks enough for me.

There was an issue like this with my v12 work on nbtree, with the
TPC-C indexes. They were always ~40% smaller, but there was a
regression when TPC-C was used with a small number of warehouses, when
the data could easily fit in memory (which is not allowed by the TPC-C
spec, in effect). TPC-C is very write-heavy, which combined with
everything else causes this problem. I wasn't doing anything too fancy
there -- the regression seemed to happen simply because the index was
smaller, not because of the overhead of doing page splits differently
or anything like that (there were far fewer splits).

I expect there to be some regression for workloads like this. I am
willing to accept that provided it's not too noticeable, and doesn't
have an impact on other workloads. I am optimistic about it.

> Regarding bitmap indexes itself, I think our BRIN could provide them.
> However, it would be useful to have opclass parameters to make them
> tunable.

I thought that we might implement them in nbtree myself. But we don't
need to decide now.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan