Re: index prefetching

On Wed, Jul 16, 2025 at 4:46 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something, but the current interface doesn't seem to work
> for AMs that don't have a 1:1 mapping between the block number portion of the
> tid and the actual block number?

I'm not completely sure what you mean here.

Even within nbtree, posting list tuples work by setting the
INDEX_ALT_TID_MASK index tuple header bit. That makes nbtree interpret
IndexTupleData.t_tid as metadata (in this case describing a posting
list). Obviously, that isn't "a standard IndexTuple", but that won't
break either patch/approach.

The index AM is obligated to pass back heap TIDs, without any external
code needing to understand these sorts of implementation details. The
on-disk representation of TIDs remains an implementation detail known
only to index AMs.

--
Peter Geoghegan