We last researched index-only scans, also called covering indexes, in
September of 2008, but have made little progress on it since. Many have
been waiting for Heikki to implement this but I talked to him and he
doesn't have time.
I believe it is time for the community to move forward and I would like
to assemble a team to work on this feature. We might not be able to
implement it for Postgres 9.1, but hopefully we can make some progress
on this.
I have created a wiki page for this TODO item:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Index-only_scans
I am interested in people improving this wiki page, and in people
discussing and coding some of the items needed to implement this
feature. I have personally talked to a few people already who seemed
receptive.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +