Re: Automatic index advisor?

Bill Karwin wrote:
> When I searched for a solution for PostgreSQL, Gurjeet Singh's name
> came up as the designer of an index adviser patch for PG. But the
> latest information I found was in 2007.

Sort of. That was originally written by Kai-Uwe Sattler:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2006-10/msg00083.php

Gurjeet talked a bit about his role in updating the whole thing at
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2007-04/msg00300.php and
the result of that is that it needed some rework to be acceptable to the
main project. Shortly afterwards Tom Lane updated the internal database
hooks to allow a better integrated patch:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2007-05/msg00421.php

And as far as I know that's where it stopped at as far as community work
goes. Gurjeet created the pgFoundry project but never uploaded any
files compatible with the new hooks, and the Index Advisor project
remained in the "Wishlist" for the 8.3 and 8.4 versions of the project
without anyone seeing new patches submitted.

> If Gurjeet's patch is still under development, are there any other
> tools currently available for PostgreSQL that provide this kind of
> capability?

It may still be under development inside Enterprise DB, I haven't seen
any reference to it but wouldn't be surprised if it shows up one day as
a part of the next release of their "Postgres Plus Advanced Server"
commercial product product or something like that. He's still floating
around and may chime in directly here.

We have a commercial product that does tuning advisory work at
http://www.tuningcloud.com/ including index suggestions, but this list
isn't the place to launch into a full ad about that.

Much like Parallel Query, this sort of project is just big enough to be
hard to fund without a commercial sponsor, and once you have one of
those and it all works it's really difficult to then give the result
away when it's an easy thing to sell as an add-on. There's certainly a
dollar figure that would allow taking Kai-Uwe and Gurjeet's work and
funding the necessary improvements to finish off making that integrated
directly into the database. So far, if anybody has done that, they're
not talking about it and/or not releasing it as open-source that I know of.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us