On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Jeff Davis <pg...@j-davis.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 12:54 +0400, Alexander Korotkov wrote: > > > The first thing caught my eye in existing GiST code is idea of > > subtype_float. float8 has limited precision and can't respresent, for > > example, varlena values good enough. Even if we have large int8 value > > we can loose lower bits, but data distribution can be so that these > > bits are valuable. Wouldn't it better to have function like > > subtype_diff_float which returns difference between two values of > > subtype as an float? Using of such function could make penalty more > > sensible to even small difference between values, and accordingly more > > relevant. > > The reason I did it that way is for unbounded ranges. With > subtype_diff_float, it's difficult for the GiST code to differentiate > between [10,) and [100000,), because infinity minus anything is > infinity. But when inserting the range [100,200), the penalty for the > first one should be zero and the second one should have some positive > penalty, right? > I meant that penalty can be determined as sum of difference of old and new bounds of range, i.e. penalty = subtype_diff_float(new_lower, old_lower) + subtype_diff_float(old_upper, new_upper). When we insert [100,200) into [10,+inf), union([100,200), [10,+inf)) = [10,+inf), so penalty = subtype_diff_float(10,10) + subtype_diff_float(+inf, +inf) = 0 + 0 = 0. When we insert [100,200) into [100000,), union([100,200), [100000,+inf)) = [100,+inf), so penalty = subtype_diff_float(100,100000) + subtype_diff_float(+inf, +inf) = 99900 + 0 = 99900. But, there are still the problem, when we'are inserting open interval when there is no such open intervals yet. For example, we're going to insert [0,+inf), while root page contains [0,10), [10,20), [20,30). Each penalty will be infinity, while it seems to be better to insert it into [0,10). But, it seems to me to be general limitation of current GiST interface, when we have to express penalty in a single float. ------ With best regards, Alexander Korotkov.
