Re: BRIN minmax multi - incorrect distance for infinite timestamp/date

On 10/13/23 14:04, Dean Rasheed wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Oct 2023 at 11:44, Tomas Vondra
> <tomas(dot)vondra(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On 10/13/23 11:21, Dean Rasheed wrote:
>>>
>>> Is this only inefficient? Or can it also lead to wrong query results?
>>
>> I don't think it can produce incorrect results. It only affects which
>> values we "merge" into an interval when building the summaries.
>>
>
> Ah, I get it now. These "distance" support functions are only used to
> see how far apart 2 ranges are, for the purposes of the algorithm that
> merges the 2 closest ranges. So if it gets it wrong, it only leads to
> a poor choice of ranges to merge, making the query inefficient, but
> still correct.
>

Right.

> Presumably, that also makes this kind of change safe to back-patch
> (not sure if you were planning to do that?), since it will only affect
> range merging choices when inserting new values into existing indexes.
>

I do plan to backpatch this, yes. I don't think there are many people
affected by this (few people are using infinite dates/timestamps, but
maybe the overflow could be more common).

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
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