Ron <rjpeace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > At 07:23 PM 1/20/2006, Tom Lane wrote: >> Well, we're trying to split an index page that's gotten full into >> two index pages, preferably with approximately equal numbers of items in >> each new page (this isn't a hard requirement though). > Maybe we are over thinking this. What happens if we do the obvious > and just make a new page and move the "last" n/2 items on the full > page to the new page? Search performance will go to hell in a handbasket :-(. We have to make at least some effort to split the page in a way that will allow searches to visit only one of the two child pages rather than both. It's certainly true though that finding the furthest pair is not a necessary component of that. It's reasonable if you try to visualize the problem in 2D or 3D, but I'm not sure that that geometric intuition holds up in such a high-dimensional space as we have here. regards, tom lane
