On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 11:04 AM Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think I may pursue a different approach to the problem that led me > to think about this, at least for the moment. But I'm still curious > about the general question: if somebody showed up with a well-written > patch that added a GIN index to a system catalog, would that > potentially be acceptable, or DOA?
Surely it would depend on the use case. Is this just an intellectual exercise, or do you actually plan on doing something like this, in whatever way? For example, does the posting list compression seem like it might offer a compelling trade-off for some system catalog indexes over and above B-Tree deduplication? I'm asking this (at least in part) because it affects the answer. Lots of stuff that GIN does that seems like it would be particularly tricky to integrate with a system catalog is non-essential. It could be (and sometimes is) selectively disabled. Whereas B-Tree indexes don't really have any optional features (you can disable deduplication selectively, but I believe that approximately nobody ever found it useful to do so). -- Peter Geoghegan
