> Lately, I have been thinking that a cool form of index would be some sort > of "persistent reference" index. Like the old ISAM days of yore, a fixed > number could point you right to the row that you want. I'm not sure if the > "persistent reference" is a specific auto numbering column type or > separate index structure or both.
What you are talking about is a 'relative file'. It turns out on modern ISAM file systems, the win you get over b-tree indexing is not worth losing the ability to do simple things like run-length compression on strings. Anyways, while storing a physical offset is O(1), so is computing a hash. How would a hash index not fill your need? Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org