On 11/21/05, Jim C. Nasby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What about Greg Stark's idea of combining Simon's idea of storing > per-heap-block xmin/xmax with using that information in an index scan? > ISTM that's the best of everything that's been presented: it allows for > faster index scans without adding a lot of visibility overhead to the > index heap, and it also allows VACUUM to hit only pages that need > vacuuming. Presumably this could also be used as the on-disk backing for > the FSM, or it could potentially replace the FSM.
This should be a big win all around, especially now since in memory bitmaps make it more likely that some classes of queries will be pure index. I still think it would be useful to have a estimated_count() which switches to whatever method is needed to get a reasonably accurate count quickly (stats when there are no wheres we can't predict, sampling otherwise if the involved tables are large, and a normal count in other cases.) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly