[postgis-devel] Re: [HACKERS] New Index

[David Fuhry]

algatt,

    You might find the examples of PostGIS [1] and SP-GiST [2] helpful 
in implementing your PR-Tree index, although the former implements only 
2D R-Trees and the latter implements tries, quadtrees, and kd-trees but 
not R-Trees (and extends GiST).

    Yours may be the first PostgreSQL R-Tree implementation which takes 
advantage of bulk-loading.  The Oracle Spatial guys have had a 
bulk-loading implementation [3] since 10g, based on [4].

-Dave Fuhry

[1] http://postgis.refractions.net/
[2] http://www.cs.purdue.edu/spgist/
[3] Ning An, Kothuri Venkata Ravi Kanth, Siva Ravada: Improving 
Performance with Bulk-Inserts in Oracle R-Trees. VLDB 2003: 948-951
[4] L. Arge, K. Hinrichs, et al. Efficient Bulk Operations
on Dynamic R-trees. In Workshop on Algorithm Engi-
neering and Experimentation (ALENEX), pages 328–
348, 1999.


Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> algatt wrote:
>> I am trying to create a new index for high multi-dimensional indexing.
>> The index I'm trying to use in PR-Tree ( www.cs.duke.edu/~yike/prtree/
>> ).
>>
>> I have created a new source file in "src/backend/access/" and for now
>> I have created the empty functions: build, insert, vacuum, etc... I
>> believe that this has to be done in C. Then I ran "/src/include/
>> catalog/unused_oids" to find the unused oids, and then i added the
>> oids to the functions in the source "file /src/include/catalog/
>> pg_proc.h". I re-ran initdb and inserted the functions in pg_am table.
> 
> You seem to be on the right track.
> 
>> Now obviously I have to add the proper code to the functions, but the
>> version of the code I have for the PR-Tree is in C++. Is there a way
>> to implement the functions using the existing PR-Tree code in C++?
> 
> No, we don't support C++ in the backend. It's almost certainly easier to
> just start from scratch anyway, because integrating it with all the
> PostgreSQL infrastructure like the buffer manager, vacuum, WAL-logging,
> data type and operator system.
>