Hi all,

I wonder, could the recent work on index only scans pave the way for auto 
clustered tables?  Consider a wide, mostly insert table with some subset of 
columns that I'd like to cluster on.  I'm after locality of tuples that are 
very frequently fetched together, but not keen on the downtime for a cluster, 
nor the maintenance that it requires.  Would it be a stretch to have an index 
that branches on the subset of "cluster" columns, but still stores all the 
columns, making it a covering index?  Given that we can already index 
concurrently, such an index would not require downtime, and would be self 
maintaining.  From my understanding of the index-only scan implementation, I 
suspect that such an index would effectively give locality, with some caveats… 

I'd expect the overhead of inserting in to such a table would be high, perhaps 
prohibitive.  Perhaps better ways have been discussed.  Stupid idea?

--Royce


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