Keyed Tables

Started by Glen and Rosanne Eustaceover 26 years ago19 messages
#1Glen and Rosanne Eustace
agree@godzone.net.nz

I thought I had already posted this query but now I can't remember. If
I have please excuse the repeat. But as I can't remember the answer
either can someone please comment.

Is there likely to be any attempt to allow a table to be keyed. It
seems that by default a table is created as a heap and in order to
improve access speed, one must create indices on that table.

I use Ingres at work and quite like the ability to do a 'modify table to
btree' type of command. When the table concerned is basically only a
key plus value, it seems rather inefficient to have to have both the
heap and then an index when supposedly one could simply make the table
into a btree in the first place.

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#2Bruce Momjian
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us
In reply to: Glen and Rosanne Eustace (#1)
Re: [GENERAL] Keyed Tables

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]

I thought I had already posted this query but now I can't remember. If
I have please excuse the repeat. But as I can't remember the answer
either can someone please comment.

Is there likely to be any attempt to allow a table to be keyed. It
seems that by default a table is created as a heap and in order to
improve access speed, one must create indices on that table.

I use Ingres at work and quite like the ability to do a 'modify table to
btree' type of command. When the table concerned is basically only a
key plus value, it seems rather inefficient to have to have both the
heap and then an index when supposedly one could simply make the table
into a btree in the first place.

Yes, it is a nice feature, but we don't support it. We do have CLUSTER,
but that is not as nice.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
#3Glen and Rosanne Eustace
agree@godzone.net.nz
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#2)
RE: [GENERAL] Keyed Tables

Yes, it is a nice feature, but we don't support it. We do
have CLUSTER, but that is not as nice.

Any chance of adding it to the list of possible enhancements ?

#4Bruce Momjian
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us
In reply to: Glen and Rosanne Eustace (#3)
Re: [GENERAL] Keyed Tables

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]

Yes, it is a nice feature, but we don't support it. We do
have CLUSTER, but that is not as nice.

Any chance of adding it to the list of possible enhancements ?

Not sure it is do-able for us. It would require so much work, that I
hesitate to add it.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
#5Andy Lewis
alewis@themecca.net
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#4)
Full Text Searches

Whats the possibility of having full text searches added to text fields?

That would be awesome.....

Andy

#6Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Andy Lewis (#5)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Andy Lewis wrote:

Whats the possibility of having full text searches added to text fields?

That would be awesome.....

Unfortunately, full text indexing is a different issue than the kind of
indexing performed on table columns, and if you want to do any kind of
efficient full text searching, you have to index the individual words in
the text or it'd be so slow as to be hardly useful (especially if you're
talking about 600,000 records with 2K of text in each text field).

Excalibur, for instance, creates its own internal indexing for full text
records, but uses an underlying SQL database for regular fielded data, and
when you design your database, you have to make the distinction about what
kind of indexing you want, stop words (words you don't want indexed, like
'the' and 'of'), and the way certain fields can or will be searched.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech,
wisdom, needlework, and chastity.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

#7Bruce Momjian
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us
In reply to: Brett W. McCoy (#6)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

We have a fulltext stuff in the contrib directory.

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Andy Lewis wrote:

Whats the possibility of having full text searches added to text fields?

That would be awesome.....

Unfortunately, full text indexing is a different issue than the kind of
indexing performed on table columns, and if you want to do any kind of
efficient full text searching, you have to index the individual words in
the text or it'd be so slow as to be hardly useful (especially if you're
talking about 600,000 records with 2K of text in each text field).

Excalibur, for instance, creates its own internal indexing for full text
records, but uses an underlying SQL database for regular fielded data, and
when you design your database, you have to make the distinction about what
kind of indexing you want, stop words (words you don't want indexed, like
'the' and 'of'), and the way certain fields can or will be searched.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech,
wisdom, needlework, and chastity.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
#8Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#7)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

We have a fulltext stuff in the contrib directory.

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lonely is a man without love.
-- Englebert Humperdinck

#9Andy Lewis
alewis@themecca.net
In reply to: Brett W. McCoy (#8)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

Its not really, really explanitory.....

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Brett W. McCoy wrote:

Show quoted text

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

We have a fulltext stuff in the contrib directory.

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lonely is a man without love.
-- Englebert Humperdinck

#10Lincoln Spiteri
lincoln.spiteri@st.com
In reply to: Andy Lewis (#9)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

He means the contrib directory in the source tree not the one on the ftp site.

On Mon, 24 May 1999, bmccoy@lan2wan.com wrote:

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

It is called contrib/fulltextindex. Does someone want to suggest a
better name?

I didn't see it on the ftp site. I only saw pgv and tcldb in the contrib
directory.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cabbage, n.:
A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
a man's head.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lincoln Spiteri

Manufacturing Systems
STMicroelectronics, Malta

e-mail: lincoln.spiteri@st.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#11Bruce Momjian
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us
In reply to: Brett W. McCoy (#8)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

We have a fulltext stuff in the contrib directory.

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

It is called contrib/fulltextindex. Does someone want to suggest a
better name?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
#12Kaare Rasmussen
kar@webline.dk
In reply to: Andy Lewis (#9)
Outer joins

Going through the documentation I can only find little about outer
joins. One statement is in the Changes doc about including syntax for
outer joins, but there doesn't seem to be implemented any code after
that.

Is it true that there's no outer joins yet? Any plans? Btw. what is the
syntax for outer joins. I know only Oracle's (+) operator.

#13Bruce Momjian
maillist@candle.pha.pa.us
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#11)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

It is called contrib/fulltextindex. Does someone want to suggest a
better name?

I didn't see it on the ftp site. I only saw pgv and tcldb in the contrib
directory.

Sorry, I meant in the distribution's contrib directory, not the ftp
site. I didn't even know we had a contrib directory on the ftp site.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
#14Noname
reedstrm@wallace.ece.rice.edu
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#13)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

It is called contrib/fulltextindex. Does someone want to suggest a
better name?

I didn't see it on the ftp site. I only saw pgv and tcldb in the contrib
directory.

Ah, here's the problem. Bruce means the contrib directory in the
source distribution, which is at the top level, right beside src
(were the core of postgresql lives). It's pgsql/contrib, if you
do a CVS checkout. I'm not sure where it ends up in various binary
packages. (/usr/lib/postgresql/contrib on my Debian Linux install,
for example, has parts of it,m but not the whole thing)

Ross
--
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu>
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005

#15Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#11)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

What's it called? I only see some tcl frontend stuff. Despite my
pessimism form the prior message, I am interested in a full text retrieval
engine.

It is called contrib/fulltextindex. Does someone want to suggest a
better name?

I didn't see it on the ftp site. I only saw pgv and tcldb in the contrib
directory.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Cabbage, n.:
A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
a man's head.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

#16Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Bruce Momjian (#13)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Sorry, I meant in the distribution's contrib directory, not the ftp
site. I didn't even know we had a contrib directory on the ftp site.

Wel, you do now! Thanks! I'll check it out!

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Once, adv.:
Enough.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

#17Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Brett W. McCoy (#15)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

Hey, found the module. Looks pretty interesting -- even has the
capability of ignoring stopwords. This is just what I am looking for!

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?"
-- Dr. Who

#18Lincoln Spiteri
lincoln.spiteri@st.com
In reply to: Brett W. McCoy (#17)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

Sorry, I got this in my mail this morning,

Due to a problem in the European Internet Gateway yesterday (solved this
morning by xxxxx ), outgoing internet emails will suffer huge delays.

The queue should be fully processed during next european night.

Regards

Lincoln

On Tue, 25 May 1999, bmccoy@lan2wan.com wrote:

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Lincoln Spiteri wrote:

He means the contrib directory in the source tree not the one on the ftp site.

Yeah, we got that cleared up yesterday.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a
smurfette."
-- P. Buhr, Computer Science 354

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lincoln Spiteri

Manufacturing Systems
STMicroelectronics, Malta

e-mail: lincoln.spiteri@st.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#19Brett W. McCoy
bmccoy@lan2wan.com
In reply to: Lincoln Spiteri (#10)
Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Lincoln Spiteri wrote:

He means the contrib directory in the source tree not the one on the ftp site.

Yeah, we got that cleared up yesterday.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a
smurfette."
-- P. Buhr, Computer Science 354