Re: Fast insertion indexes: why no developments

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> On 29 October 2013 16:10, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Leonardo Francalanci <m_lists(at)yahoo(dot)it> wrote:
>>>> I don't see much interest in insert-efficient indexes.
>>>
>>> Presumably someone will get around to implementing a btree index
>>> insertion buffer one day. I think that would be a particularly
>>> compelling optimization for us, because we could avoid ever inserting
>>> index tuples that are already dead when the deferred insertion
>>> actually occurs.
>>
>> That's pretty much what the LSM-tree is.
>
> What is pretty cool about this sort of thing is that there's no
> intrinsic reason the insertion buffer needs to be block-structured or
> disk-backed. In theory, you can structure the in-memory portion of
> the tree any way you like, using pointers and arbitrary-size memory
> allocations and all that fun stuff. You need to log that there's a
> deferred insert (or commit to flushing the insertion buffer before
> every commit, which would seem to miss the point)

Such a thing would help COPY, so maybe it's worth a look