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Rewrite GiST documentation into something actually useful.

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Christopher Kings-Lynne
REL7_4_STABLE
Tom Lane 23 years ago
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      doc/src/sgml/gist.sgml

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$Header: /cvsroot/pgsql/doc/src/sgml/gist.sgml,v 1.12 2003/09/29 18:18:35 momjian Exp $
$Header: /cvsroot/pgsql/doc/src/sgml/gist.sgml,v 1.13 2003/10/31 22:41:21 tgl Exp $
-->
<Chapter Id="gist">
<DocInfo>
<AuthorGroup>
<Author>
<FirstName>Gene</FirstName>
<Surname>Selkov</Surname>
</Author>
</AuthorGroup>
<Date>Transcribed 1998-02-19</Date>
</DocInfo>
<Title>GiST Indexes</Title>
<Para>
The information about GIST is at
<ULink url="http://GiST.CS.Berkeley.EDU:8000/gist/">http://GiST.CS.Berkeley.EDU:8000/gist/</ULink>
with more on different indexing and sorting schemes at
<ULink url="http://s2k-ftp.CS.Berkeley.EDU:8000/personal/jmh/">http://s2k-ftp.CS.Berkeley.EDU:8000/personal/jmh/</ULink>.
And there is more interesting reading at
<ULink url="http://epoch.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/">http://epoch.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/</ULink> and
<ULink url="http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/">http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/</ULink>.
</para>
<Para>
<Note>
<Title>Author</Title>
<Para>
This extraction from an email sent by
Eugene Selkov, Jr. (<email>selkovjr@mcs.anl.gov</email>)
contains good information
on GiST. Hopefully we will learn more in the future and update this information.
- thomas 1998-03-01
</Para>
</Note>
</para>
<Para>
Well, I can't say I quite understand what's going on, but at least
I (almost) succeeded in porting GiST examples to linux. The GiST access
method is already in the postgres tree (<FileName>src/backend/access/gist</FileName>).
</para>
<Para>
<ULink url="ftp://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/gist/pggist/pggist.tgz">Examples at Berkeley</ULink>
come with an overview of the methods and demonstrate spatial index
mechanisms for 2D boxes, polygons, integer intervals and text
(see also <ULink url="http://gist.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/gist/">GiST at Berkeley</ULink>).
In the box example, we
are supposed to see a performance gain when using the GiST index; it did
work for me but I do not have a reasonably large collection of boxes
to check that. Other examples also worked, except polygons: I got an
error doing
<ProgramListing>
test=> CREATE INDEX pix ON polytmp
test-> USING GIST (p:box gist_poly_ops) WITH (ISLOSSY);
ERROR: cannot open pix
(PostgreSQL 6.3 Sun Feb 1 14:57:30 EST 1998)
</ProgramListing>
</para>
<Para>
I could not get sense of this error message; it appears to be something
we'd rather ask the developers about (see also Note 4 below). What I
would suggest here is that someone of you linux guys (linux==gcc?) fetch the
original sources quoted above and apply my patch (see attachment) and
tell us what you feel about it. Looks cool to me, but I would not like
to hold it up while there are so many competent people around.
</para>
<Para>
A few notes on the sources:
</para>
<Para>
1. I failed to make use of the original (HP-UX) Makefile and rearranged
the Makefile from the ancient postgres95 tutorial to do the job. I tried
to keep it generic, but I am a very poor makefile writer -- just did
some monkey work. Sorry about that, but I guess it is now a little
more portable that the original makefile.
</para>
<Para>
2. I built the example sources right under pgsql/src (just extracted the
tar file there). The aforementioned Makefile assumes it is one level
below pgsql/src (in our case, in pgsql/src/pggist).
</para>
<Para>
3. The changes I made to the *.c files were all about #include's,
function prototypes and typecasting. Other than that, I just threw
away a bunch of unused vars and added a couple parentheses to please
gcc. I hope I did not screw up too much :)
</para>
<Para>
4. There is a comment in polyproc.sql:
<ProgramListing>
-- -- there's a memory leak in rtree poly_ops!!
-- -- CREATE INDEX pix2 ON polytmp USING RTREE (p poly_ops);
</ProgramListing>
Roger that!! I thought it could be related to a number of
<ProductName>PostgreSQL</ProductName> versions
back and tried the query. My system went nuts and I had to shoot down
the postmaster in about ten minutes.
</para>
<Para>
I will continue to look into GiST for a while, but I would also
appreciate
more examples of R-tree usage.
</para>
</Chapter>
<chapter Id="GiST">
<title>GiST Indexes</title>
<sect1 id="intro">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>
<acronym>GiST</acronym> stands for Generalized Search Tree. It is a
balanced, tree-structured access method, that acts as a base template in
which to implement arbitrary indexing schemes. B+-trees, R-trees and many
other indexing schemes can be implemented in <acronym>GiST</acronym>.
</para>
<para>
One advantage of <acronym>GiST</acronym> is that it allows the development
of custom data types with the appropriate access methods, by
an expert in the domain of the data type, rather than a database expert.
</para>
<para>
Some of the information here is derived from <ulink
url="http://gist.cs.berkeley.edu/">the University of California at
Berkeley's GiST Indexing Project web site</ulink> and Marcel Kornacker's
thesis,
<ulink url="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/448594.html">Access Methods for
Next-Generation Database Systems</ulink>. The <acronym>GiST</acronym>
implementation in <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> is primarily
maintained by Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov, and there is more
information on their website: <ulink
url="http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/"></>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="extensibility">
<title>Extensibility</title>
<para>
Traditionally, implementing a new index access method meant a lot of
difficult work. It was necessary to understand the inner workings of the
database, such as the lock manager and Write-Ahead Log. The
<acronym>GiST</acronym> interface has a high level of abstraction,
requiring the access method implementor to only implement the semantics of
the data type being accessed. The <acronym>GiST</acronym> layer itself
takes care of concurrency, logging and searching the tree structure.
</para>
<para>
This extensibility should not be confused with the extensibility of the
other standard search trees in terms of the data they can handle. For
example, <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> supports extensible B+-trees
and R-trees. That means that you can use
<productname>PostgreSQL</productname> to build a B+-tree or R-tree over any
data type you want. But B+-trees only support range predicates
(<literal>&lt;</literal>, <literal>=</literal>, <literal>&gt;</literal>),
and R-trees only support n-D range queries (contains, contained, equals).
</para>
<para>
So if you index, say, an image collection with a
<productname>PostgreSQL</productname> B+-tree, you can only issue queries
such as <quote>is imagex equal to imagey</quote>, <quote>is imagex less
than imagey</quote> and <quote>is imagex greater than imagey</quote>?
Depending on how you define <quote>equals</quote>, <quote>less than</quote>
and <quote>greater than</quote> in this context, this could be useful.
However, by using a <acronym>GiST</acronym> based index, you could create
ways to ask domain-specific questions, perhaps <quote>find all images of
horses</quote> or <quote>find all over-exposed images</quote>.
</para>
<para>
All it takes to get a <acronym>GiST</acronym> access method up and running
is to implement seven user-defined methods, which define the behavior of
keys in the tree. Of course these methods have to be pretty fancy to
support fancy queries, but for all the standard queries (B+-trees,
R-trees, etc.) they're relatively straightforward. In short,
<acronym>GiST</acronym> combines extensibility along with generality, code
reuse, and a clean interface.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="implementation">
<title>Implementation</title>
<para>
There are seven methods that an index operator class for
<acronym>GiST</acronym> must provide:
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>consistent</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Given a predicate <literal>p</literal> on a tree page, and a user
query, <literal>q</literal>, this method will return false if it is
certain that both <literal>p</literal> and <literal>q</literal> cannot
be true for a given data item.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>union</term>
<listitem>
<para>
This method consolidates information in the tree. Given a set of
entries, this function generates a new predicate that is true for all
the entries.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>compress</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Converts the data item into a format suitable for physical storage in
an index page.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>decompress</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The reverse of the <function>compress</function> method. Converts the
index representation of the data item into a format that can be
manipulated by the database.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>penalty</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Returns a value indicating the <quote>cost</quote> of inserting the new
entry into a particular branch of the tree. items will be inserted
down the path of least <function>penalty</function> in the tree.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>picksplit</term>
<listitem>
<para>
When a page split is necessary, this function decides which entries on
the page are to stay on the old page, and which are to move to the new
page.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>same</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Returns true if two entries are identical, false otherwise.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="limitations">
<title>Limitations</title>
<para>
The current implementation of <acronym>GiST</acronym> within
<productname>PostgreSQL</productname> has some major limitations:
<acronym>GiST</acronym> access is not concurrent; the
<acronym>GiST</acronym> interface doesn't allow the development of certain
data types, such as digital trees (see papers by Aoki et al); and there
is not yet any support for write-ahead logging of updates in
<acronym>GiST</acronym> indexes.
</para>
<para>
Solutions to the concurrency problems appear in Marcel Kornacker's
thesis; however these ideas have not yet been put into practice in the
<productname>PostgreSQL</productname> implementation.
</para>
<para>
The lack of write-ahead logging is just a small matter of programming,
but since it isn't done yet, a crash could render a <acronym>GiST</acronym>
index inconsistent, forcing a REINDEX.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="examples">
<title>Examples</title>
<para>
To see example implementations of index methods implemented using
<acronym>GiST</acronym>, examine the following contrib modules:
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>btree_gist</term>
<listitem>
<para>B-Tree</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>cube</term>
<listitem>
<para>Indexing for multi-dimensional cubes</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>intarray</term>
<listitem>
<para>RD-Tree for one-dimensional array of int4 values</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>ltree</term>
<listitem>
<para>Indexing for tree-like stuctures</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>rtree_gist</term>
<listitem>
<para>R-Tree</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>seg</term>
<listitem>
<para>Storage and indexed access for <quote>float ranges</quote></para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>tsearch and tsearch2</term>
<listitem>
<para>Full text indexing</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</sect1>
</chapter>

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