On 2 August 2018 at 21:32, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
If I want to sort on heap TID as a tie-breaker, I cannot cut any corners. That is, it has to be just another column, at least as far as the implementation is concerned (heap TID will have a different representation in internal pages and leaf high keys, but nonetheless it's essentially just another column in the keyspace). This means that if I don't have suffix truncation, I'll regress performance in many important cases that have no compensating benefit (e.g. pgbench). There is no point in trying to assess that.
If you include heap TID as a column the suffix will be unique and cannot benefit from suffix truncation.
It would be better to avoid including the heap TID as a column, since it is already there. Or the other way around, don't include it as payload if it is has to be a column.
Alternatively, include only the heap block number. That would make it non-unique, but never more than 240 duplicates. So it would allow suffix truncation, and yet still avoid the multi-page split effect.
--
Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services