Tom Lane wrote:
The fly in the ointment is that after collecting the pg_index definition of the index, plancat.c also wants to know how big it is --- it calls RelationGetNumberOfBlocks. And that absolutely does look at the physical storage, which means it absolutely is unsafe to do in parallel with a REINDEX that will be dropping the old physical storage at some point. So maybe we are stuck and we have to say "that doesn't work anymore". But it feels like we might not be too far away from letting it still work. Thoughts, ideas?
A suggestion that seems a bit like a leap backwards in time - maybe just use the pg_class.relpages entry for the index size?
I'm punting that with autovacuum being enabled by default now, the relpages entries for all relations will be more representative than they used to in previous releases.
Cheers Mark ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match