Skip scan

Postgres FM

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Peter Geoghegan, major contributor and committer to Postgres, to discuss adding skip scan support to PostgreSQL over versions 17 and 18.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

• Peter Geoghegan https://postgres.fm/people/peter-geoghegan
• Peter’s previous (excellent) interview on Postgres TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAPawr1DxhM
• Efficient Search of Multidimensional B-Trees (1995 paper by Harry Leslie, Rohit Jain, Dave Birdsall, and Hedieh Yaghmai) https://vldb.org/conf/1995/P710.PDF
• Index Skip Scanning in Oracle https://oracle-base.com/articles/9i/index-skip-scanning
• Peter’s introductory email to the hackers mailing list about adding skip scan https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/[e-mail]
• Loose Indexscan versus Index Skip Scan (PostgreSQL wiki) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Loose_indexscan
• Tom Lane will be on the Talking Postgres podcast on October 9th https://aka.ms/TalkingPostgres-Ep20-cal
• Benoit Tigeot feedback and repro (originally reported via Slack) https://gist.github.com/benoittgt/ab72dc4cfedea2a0c6a5ee809d16e04d?permalink_comment_id=4597410#gistcomment-4597410
• Summary video and blog post about the v17 work by Lukas from pganalyze (not mentioned but great) https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-17-faster-btree-index-scans
• Understanding HNSW + filtering (pgvector repo discussion) https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/issues/259
• btree_gin https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/btree-gin.html

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork