Re: PG 12 draft release notes

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 5:22 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> I had become so confused by this item that I needed a few weeks to
> settle on what was actually going on.

I put a lot of time into my pgCon talk, especially on the diagrams.
Seems like that paid off. Even Heikki was confused by my explanations
at one point.

I should go add a similar diagram to our documentation, under "Chapter
63. B-Tree Indexes", because diagrams are the only sensible way to
explain the concepts.

> I was wrong.  I was thinking of this commit:
>
>     commit d2086b08b0
>     Author: Alexander Korotkov <akorotkov@postgresql.org>
>     Date:   Sat Jul 28 00:31:40 2018 +0300
>
>     Reduce path length for locking leaf B-tree pages during insertion

> > If you had to cut one thing from this list, then I would suggest that
> > it be this item. It's nice, but it's also very obvious, which makes it
> > hard to explain.

> Right.  The commit mentioned a 4.5x speedup in a rare benchmark, so I
> added it lower on the list.

My remark about cutting an item referred to a lesser item that I
worked on (the 'Add nbtree high key "continuescan" optimization'
commit), not Alexander independent B-Tree work. I think that
Alexander's optimization is also quite effective. Though FWIW the 4.5x
improvement concerned a case involving lots of duplicates...cases with
a lot of duplicates will be far far better in Postgres 12. (I never
tested my patch without Alexander's commit, since it went in early in
the v12 cycle.)

> Yes, locality.

"Locality" is one of my favorite words.

> Attached is an updated patch.  I might have missed something, but I
> think it might be close.

This looks great. I do have a few things:

* I would put "Improve performance and space utilization of btree
indexes with many duplicates" first (before "Allow multi-column btree
indexes to be smaller"). I think that this is far more common than we
tend to assume, and is also where the biggest benefits are.

* The wording of the "many duplicates" item itself is almost perfect,
though the "...and inefficiency when VACUUM needed to find a row for
removal" part seems a bit off -- this is really about the
effectiveness of VACUUM, not the speed at which the VACUUM completes
(it's a bit faster, but that's not that important). Perhaps that part
should read: "...and often failed to efficiently recycle space made
available by VACUUM". Something like that.

* The "Allow multi-column btree indexes to be smaller" item is about
both suffix truncation, and about the "Split after new tuple"
optimization. I think that that makes it more complicated than it
needs to be. While the improvements that we saw with TPC-C on account
of the "Split after new tuple" optimization were nice, I doubt that
users will be looking out for it. I would be okay if you dropped any
mention of the "Split after new tuple" optimization, in the interest
of making the description more useful to users. We can just lose that.

* Once you simplify the item by making it all about suffix truncation,
it would make sense to change the single line summary to "Reduce the
number of branch blocks needed for multi-column indexes". Then go on
to talk about how we now only store those columns that are necessary
to guide index scans in tuples stored in branch pages (we tend to call
branch pages internal pages, but branch pages seems friendlier to me).
Note that the user docs of other database systems reference these
details, even in their introductory material on how B-Tree indexes
work. The term "suffix truncation" isn't something users have heard
of, and we shouldn't use it here, but the *idea* of suffix truncation
is very well established. As I mentioned, it matters for things like
covering indexes (indexes that are designed to be used by index-only
scans, which are not necessarily INCLUDE indexes).

Thanks!
--
Peter Geoghegan