On Sat, 2011-01-29 at 11:00 -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> I think I'm just revealing my ignorance of these index types and what
> they're good for. My impression has been that GIN was a better but
> less-full-featured alternative to GiST and getting better with Tom's
> recent fixes for its handling of NULLs. But, uh, obviously not.
The idea of GIN is that you store multiple entries for each tuple you
insert. So, inserting a tuple containing the document 'hello world'
would store the keys "hello" and "world" both pointing back to that
tuple. It also makes sense for arrays.
But ranges are arbitrarily long, and don't have any defined "step", so
that means an infinite number of keys. GiST works better for that.
Regards,Jeff Davis