• Alvaro Herrera's avatar
    BRIN auto-summarization · 7526e102
    Alvaro Herrera authored
    Previously, only VACUUM would cause a page range to get initially
    summarized by BRIN indexes, which for some use cases takes too much time
    since the inserts occur.  To avoid the delay, have brininsert request a
    summarization run for the previous range as soon as the first tuple is
    inserted into the first page of the next range.  Autovacuum is in charge
    of processing these requests, after doing all the regular vacuuming/
    analyzing work on tables.
    
    This doesn't impose any new tasks on autovacuum, because autovacuum was
    already in charge of doing summarizations.  The only actual effect is to
    change the timing, i.e. that it occurs earlier.  For this reason, we
    don't go any great lengths to record these requests very robustly; if
    they are lost because of a server crash or restart, they will happen at
    a later time anyway.
    
    Most of the new code here is in autovacuum, which can now be told about
    "work items" to process.  This can be used for other things such as GIN
    pending list cleaning, perhaps visibility map bit setting, both of which
    are currently invoked during vacuum, but do not really depend on vacuum
    taking place.
    
    The requests are at the page range level, a granularity for which we did
    not have SQL-level access; we only had index-level summarization
    requests via brin_summarize_new_values().  It seems reasonable to add
    SQL-level access to range-level summarization too, so add a function
    brin_summarize_range() to do that.
    
    Authors: Álvaro Herrera, based on sketch from Simon Riggs.
    Reviewed-by: Thomas Munro.
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170301045823.vneqdqkmsd4as4ds@alvherre.pgsql
    7526e102
brin.sgml 26 KB