Re: Pluggable Indexes

On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 21:45 +0200, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Ron Mayer wrote:
> > Early (2005)
> > GIST indexes were very painful in production environments because vacuuming
> > them held locks for a *long* time (IIRC, an hour or so on my database) on
> > the indexes locking out queries.  Was that just a shortcoming of the
> > implementation, or was it a side-effect of them not supporting recoverability.
> 
> The former.

In the current way of thinking early-GIST would never have been
committed and as a result we would not have PostGIS. Yes, early index
implementations can be bad and they scare the hell out of me. That's
exactly why I want to keep them out of core, so they don't need to be
perfect, they can come with all sorts of health warnings.

-- Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.comPostgreSQL Training, Services and Support