Re: index prefetching

On 1/16/24 21:10, Konstantin Knizhnik wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> 4. I think that performing prefetch at executor level is really great
>>> idea and so prefetch can be used by all indexes, including custom
>>> indexes. But prefetch will be efficient only if index can provide fast
>>> access to next TID (located at the same page). I am not sure that it is
>>> true for all builtin indexes (GIN, GIST, BRIN,...) and especially for
>>> custom AM. I wonder if we should extend AM API to make index make a
>>> decision weather to perform prefetch of TIDs or not.
>> I'm not against having a flag to enable/disable prefetching, but the
>> question is whether doing prefetching for such indexes can be harmful.
>> I'm not sure about that.
>
> I tend to agree with you - it is hard to imagine index implementation
> which doesn't win from prefetching heap pages.
> May be only the filtering case you have mentioned. But it seems to me
> that current B-Tree index scan (not IOS) implementation in Postgres
> doesn't try to use index tuple to check extra condition - it will fetch
> heap tuple in any case.
>

That's true, but that's why I started working on this:

https://commitfest.postgresql.org/46/4352/

I need to think about how to combine that with the prefetching. The good
thing is that both changes require fetching TIDs, not slots. I think the
condition can be simply added to the prefetch callback.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
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