Some user on IRC was reading the releases notes in order to plan for a minor upgrade of his 8.3.3 installation, and was puzzled about potential needs for rebuilding GIST indexes. That's from the 8.3.5 release notes, and from the 8.3.8 notes you see that you need to consider hash indexes on interval columns too. Now the question is, how to find out if any such beasts are in use in your database?

It happens that PostgreSQL is letting you know those things by querying its system catalogs. That might look hairy at first, but it's very worth getting used to those system tables. You could compare that to introspection and reflexive facilities of some programming languages, except much more useful, because you're reaching all the system at once. But, well, here it goes:

SELECT schemaname, tablename, relname, amname, indexdef
  FROM pg_indexes i
       JOIN pg_class c ON i.indexname = c.relname and c.relkind = 'i'
       JOIN pg_am am ON c.relam = am.oid
 WHERE amname = 'gist';

Now you could replace the WHERE clause with WHERE amname IN ('gist', 'hash') to check both conditions at once. What about pursuing the restriction on the hash indexes rebuild to schedule, as they should only get done to indexes on interval columns. Well let's try it:

SELECT schemaname, tablename, relname as indexname, amname, indclass
  FROM pg_indexes i
       JOIN pg_class c on i.indexname = c.relname and c.relkind = 'i'
       JOIN pg_am am on c.relam = am.oid
       JOIN pg_index x on x.indexrelid = c.oid
 WHERE amname in ('btree', 'gist')
       and schemaname not in ('pg_catalog', 'information_schema');

We're not there yet, because as you notice, the catalogs are somewhat optimized and not always in a normal form. That's good for the system's performance, but it makes querying a bit uneasy. What we want is to get from the indclass column if there's any of them (it's an oidvector) that applies to an interval data type. There's a subtlety here as the index could store interval data even if the column is not of an interval type itself, so we have to find both cases.

Well the subtlety applies after you know what an operator class is: “An operator class defines how a particular data type can be used with an index” is what the CREATE OPERATOR CLASS manual page teaches us. What we need to know here is that an index will talk to an operator class to get to the data type, either the column data type or the index storage one.

SELECT schemaname, tablename, relname as indexname, amname, indclass, opcname, typname
  FROM pg_indexes i
       JOIN pg_class c on i.indexname = c.relname and c.relkind = 'i'
       JOIN pg_am am on c.relam = am.oid
       JOIN pg_index x on x.indexrelid = c.oid
       JOIN pg_opclass o
         on string_to_array(x.indclass::text, ' ')::oid[] @> array[o.oid]::oid[]
       JOIN pg_type t on o.opckeytype = t.oid
WHERE amname = 'hash' and t.typname = 'interval'

UNION ALL

SELECT schemaname, tablename, relname as indexname, amname, indclass, opcname, typname
  FROM pg_indexes i
       JOIN pg_class c on i.indexname = c.relname and c.relkind = 'i'
       JOIN pg_am am on c.relam = am.oid
       JOIN pg_index x on x.indexrelid = c.oid
       JOIN pg_opclass o
         on string_to_array(x.indclass::text, ' ')::oid[] @> array[o.oid]::oid[]
       JOIN pg_type t on o.opcintype = t.oid
WHERE amname = 'hash' and t.typname = 'interval';

Most certainly this query will return no row for you, as hash indexes are not widely used, mainly because they are not crash tolerant. For seeing some results you could remove the amname restriction of course, that would show the query is working, but don't forget to add the restriction back to plan for the upgrade!

But hey, why walking the extra mile here, would you ask me? After all, in the second query we would already have had the information we needed should we added the indexdef column, albeit in a human reader friendly way: the resultset would then contain the CREATE INDEX command you need to issue to build the index from scratch. That would be enough for checking only the catalog, but the extra mile allows you to produce a SQL script to build the indexes that need your attention post upgrade. That last step is left as an exercise for the reader, though.

Tags

PostgreSQL release catalogs