On the other hand, once you reach the target index page, a hash index has no better method than linear scan through all the page's index entries to find the actually wanted key(s)
I wonder if it would be possible to store the keys in a hash bucket in sorted order, provided that the necessary ordering is defined for the index keys -- considering the ubiquity of b+-trees in Postgres, the chances of an ordering being defined are pretty good. Handling overflow pages would be tricky: perhaps we could store the entries in a given page in sorted order, but not try to maintain that order for the hash bucket as a whole. This would mean we'd need to do a binary search for each page of the bucket, but that would still be a win.
-Neil
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