I wrote:
> ... the leaf tuple datatype is hard-wired to be
> the same as the indexed column's type. Why is that? It seems to me
> to be both confusing and restrictive. For instance, if you'd designed
> the suffix tree opclass just a little differently, it would be wanting
> to store "char" not text in leaf nodes. Shouldn't we change this to
> allow the leaf data type to be specified explicitly?
After another day's worth of hacking, I now understand the reason for
the above: when an index is less than a page and an incoming value would
still fit on the root page, the incoming value is simply dumped into a
leaf tuple without ever calling any opclass-specific function at all.
To allow the leaf datatype to be different from the indexed column,
we'd need at least one more opclass support function, and it's not clear
that the potential gain is worth any extra complexity.
However, I now have another question: what is the point of the
allTheSame mechanism? It seems to add quite a great deal of complexity,
without saving much of any space. At least for the node key types used
so far, the null bitmap that's added to the node tuples eats just as
much space as storing a normal key would. We could probably avoid that
by using custom tuple construction code instead of index_form_tuple,
but on the whole I think it'd be better to remove the concept. For
one thing, it's giving me fits while attempting to fix the limitation
on storing long indexed values. There's no reason why a suffix tree
representation shouldn't work for long strings, but you have to be
willing to cap the length of any given inner tuple's prefix to something
that will fit on a page --- and that breaks the badly-underdocumented
allTheSame logic in spgtextproc.c. You can't choose to just drop the
node key (i.e., the next byte in the original string) unless there isn't
any because you reached the end of the string. In general it's not
clear to me why it's sensible to drop a node key ever.
I'm also still wondering what your thoughts are on storing null values
versus full-index-scan capability. I'm leaning towards getting rid of
the dead code, but if you have an idea how to remove the limitation,
maybe we should do that instead.
regards, tom lane
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