Re: Partial index on date column

> "Christopher Kings-Lynne" <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> > Obviously to you and I, referrer=1 implies that referrer is not null,
but
> > the planner doesn't know that.
>
> Actually the planner does make exactly that deduction in some other
> contexts --- but I'm hesitant to expend the cycles for partial indexes.
> Partial-index condition matching is a horribly difficult problem in
> general, and we only attempt a few limited cases right now.  I don't
> think we want to put a general-purpose theorem prover in there ---
> so it comes down to the likelihood of spotting a match in some cases,
> versus the wasted cycles of checking for a match in every query that
> doesn't fit the pattern.

Yeah, it's not really a problem for me, I just put the extra clause in.

Is indexing excluding NULLs a common application of partial indexes?  It's
basically all I use it for, when a column has like 90-95% NULLS and I want
to exclude them from the index.  Is it worth hard-coding in the IS NOT NULL
case?

Chris