It sounds to me like it should be fairly straightforward to implement online reindex. That is, reindex without locking the table. This is an important feature for 24x7 operation. Since postgres doesn't modify data in place the only thing required for online reindex is to ensure that the reindex operation sees all of the latest data.
If reindex sets a flag that causes all new inserts and updates to allocate new space at the end of the heap without checking for free space, then a simple linear scan should be guaranteed to catch all the data. (I'm not sure how the indexing operation works, if it reads in the whole table and then sorts it there would have to be an extra step where any new tuples are read in and inserted.) There would only have to be a small window with the table locked while the indexes are swapped at the end. -- greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
