Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Impressive results.

Agreed.

It seems like an important invariant for WARM is that any duplicate
index values ought to have different TIDs (actually, it's a bit
stricter than that, since btrecheck() cares about simple binary
equality). ISTM that it would be fairly easy to modify amcheck such
that the "items in logical order" check, as well as the similar
"cross-page order" check (the one that detects transposed pages) also
check that this new WARM invariant holds. Obviously this would only
make sense on the leaf level of the index.

You wouldn't have to teach amcheck about the heap, because a TID that
points to the heap can only be duplicated within a B-Tree index
because of WARM. So, if we find that two adjacent tuples are equal,
check if the TIDs are equal. If they are also equal, check for strict
binary equality. If strict binary equality is indicated, throw an
error due to invariant failing.

IIUC, the design of WARM makes this simple enough to implement, and
cheap enough that the additional runtime overhead is well worthwhile.
You could just add this check to the existing checks without changing
the user-visible interface. It seems pretty complementary to what is
already there.

--
Peter Geoghegan