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PostgreSQL 8.2.6 Documentation | ||||
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Prev | Fast Backward | Chapter 49. Index Access Method Interface Definition | Fast Forward | Next |
In an index scan, the index access method is responsible for regurgitating the TIDs of all the tuples it has been told about that match the scan keys. The access method is not involved in actually fetching those tuples from the index's parent table, nor in determining whether they pass the scan's time qualification test or other conditions.
A scan key is the internal representation of a WHERE clause of the form index_key operator constant, where the index key is one of the columns of the index and the operator is one of the members of the operator class associated with that index column. An index scan has zero or more scan keys, which are implicitly ANDed — the returned tuples are expected to satisfy all the indicated conditions.
The operator class may indicate that the index is lossy for a particular operator; this implies that the index scan will return all the entries that pass the scan key, plus possibly additional entries that do not. The core system's index-scan machinery will then apply that operator again to the heap tuple to verify whether or not it really should be selected. For non-lossy operators, the index scan must return exactly the set of matching entries, as there is no recheck.
Note that it is entirely up to the access method to ensure that it
correctly finds all and only the entries passing all the given scan keys.
Also, the core system will simply hand off all the WHERE
clauses that match the index keys and operator classes, without any
semantic analysis to determine whether they are redundant or
contradictory. As an example, given
WHERE x > 4 AND x > 14 where x is a b-tree
indexed column, it is left to the b-tree amrescan
function
to realize that the first scan key is redundant and can be discarded.
The extent of preprocessing needed during amrescan
will
depend on the extent to which the index access method needs to reduce
the scan keys to a "normalized" form.
The amgettuple
function has a direction argument,
which can be either ForwardScanDirection (the normal case)
or BackwardScanDirection. If the first call after
amrescan
specifies BackwardScanDirection, then the
set of matching index entries is to be scanned back-to-front rather than in
the normal front-to-back direction, so amgettuple
must return
the last matching tuple in the index, rather than the first one as it
normally would. (This will only occur for access
methods that advertise they support ordered scans by setting
pg_am.amorderstrategy nonzero.) After the
first call, amgettuple
must be prepared to advance the scan in
either direction from the most recently returned entry.
The access method must support "marking" a position in a scan
and later returning to the marked position. The same position may be
restored multiple times. However, only one position need be remembered
per scan; a new ammarkpos
call overrides the previously
marked position.
Both the scan position and the mark position (if any) must be maintained consistently in the face of concurrent insertions or deletions in the index. It is OK if a freshly-inserted entry is not returned by a scan that would have found the entry if it had existed when the scan started, or for the scan to return such an entry upon rescanning or backing up even though it had not been returned the first time through. Similarly, a concurrent delete may or may not be reflected in the results of a scan. What is important is that insertions or deletions not cause the scan to miss or multiply return entries that were not themselves being inserted or deleted.
Instead of using amgettuple
, an index scan can be done with
amgetmulti
to fetch multiple tuples per call. This can be
noticeably more efficient than amgettuple
because it allows
avoiding lock/unlock cycles within the access method. In principle
amgetmulti
should have the same effects as repeated
amgettuple
calls, but we impose several restrictions to
simplify matters. In the first place, amgetmulti
does not
take a direction argument, and therefore it does not support
backwards scan nor intrascan reversal of direction. The access method
need not support marking or restoring scan positions during an
amgetmulti
scan, either. (These restrictions cost little
since it would be difficult to use these features in an
amgetmulti
scan anyway: adjusting the caller's buffered
list of TIDs would be complex.) Finally, amgetmulti
does
not guarantee any locking of the returned tuples, with implications
spelled out in Section 49.4.