Index-only-scans, indexam API changes

From: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
To: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Index-only-scans, indexam API changes
Date: 2009-07-13 07:19:02
Message-ID: 4A5ADFE6.6060507@enterprisedb.com
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At the moment, amgettuple only returns pointers to heap tuples. There is
no way to return data from the index tuples. That needs to be changed to
support index-only scans.

I propose that we split index_getnext into two steps: fetching the next
match from the index (index_next()), and fetching the corresponding heap
tuple (index_fetch()). Patch attached. There is still a shorthand
index_getnext() that is compatible with the old function, but it now
just calls index_next()+index_fetch().

The new index_fetch() function can only fetch one match from a HOT
chain. That greatly simplifies the code in indexam.c. The only caller
needing to fetch more than one tuple from a HOT chain (= using
SnapshotAny) is CLUSTER, so I moved the HOT-chain following logic into
cluster.c, with small changes to heap_hot_search_buffer().

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

Attachment Content-Type Size
split-index_gettuple-1.patch text/x-diff 27.0 KB

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