[Gllug] Thoughts on the breadth of Free Software

[Nix]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Richard Jones said:
> * It'd be great if PostgreSQL could optimise itself - creating indexes
> on the fly.  Take a demanding web application, examine the queries it
> uses most often, and work out which indexes need to be added to
> optimise it.

This surely depends upon the ability to build an index without locking
the table: alas, this is exceptionally difficult stuff :( you can't use
normal snapshots because you'd end up locking almost everything in the
table against updates, and if you avoid that you have to consider
things like rows appearing, disappearing and changing index order in
the middle of the build.

It's *hard*.

-- 
`In typical emacs fashion, it is both absurdly ornate and
 still not really what one wanted.' --- jdev
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