I was wondering how index access methods reclaim the free disk pages after
they are no longer used.
I noticed that only btree access method uses the free space map. I couldn't
find in the source code of gist special handling for free pages ( like
maintaining a free list ). Does that mean that GiST indexes ( as an example
) will continue to grow forever wasting any deleted pages till the index is
rebuilt ? I also wonder why don't access methods maintain a list of free
pages for each index ?
Ramy M. Hassan
Purdue University
Research Scholar