Prefix lookup indexing for PostgreSQL
This project is described in its own page, in short prefix is about speeding up prefix lookups for them to be fast. The prefix here is not the literal but the column value:
SELECT * FROM prefixes WHERE prefix @> 'literal';
Documentation
The slides from the Prato conference are more about developping a GiST
module for PostgreSQL, but the example allowing to follow the subject is the
prefix module itself, so the mentionned slides are still a good read to
discover the project.
Or go read the prefix pgfoundry home page to get some ideas on how to use it.
Project status
The prefix project is running live and the index has already been exercised
more than 10 millions times, so I'm willing to flag the project as stable
software, or production ready if you will.
The project is however still in development, as we have some ideas on how to
speed things up some more: that's by improving the prefix range to support
arbitrary strings as delimiters, instead of just a single char as it's now
doing.
Source code development and releases
The source code has been managed under CVS up until version 1.0.0 but from
there it's now living over there at github. Feel free to clone it!
The releases are made in source tarball format on pgfoundry and thanks to my
debian sponsor binary releases hit debian too.