On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> wrote: > Robert Haas wrote: >> So, what do we need in order to find our way to index-only scans? >> >> 1. The visibility map needs to be crash-safe. The basic idea of >> index-only scans is that, instead of checking the heap to find out >> whether each tuple is visible, we first check the visibility map. If >> the visibility map bit is set, then we know all tuples on the page are >> visible to all transactions, and therefore the tuple of interest is >> visible to our transaction. Assuming that a significant number of >> visibility map bits are set, this should enable us to avoid a fair >> amount of I/O, especially on large tables, because the visibility map >> is roughly 8000 times smaller than the heap, and therefore far more >> practical to keep in cache. However, before we can rely on the > > FYI, because the visibility map is only one _bit_ per page, it is 8000 * > 8 or 64k times smaller than the heap, e.g. one 8k page covers 64MB of > heap pages. This is important because we rely on this compactness in > hope that the WAL logging of this information will not be burdensome.
I accuse you of bad math. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
