hstore_ops - better operator class for hstore

hstore_ops extension provides another implementation of GIN index (opclass) for hstore. It provides smaller index and faster @> operator queries than default GIN opclass. However, queries containing ?, ?|, ?& operators could become a little slower.

Idea of this opclass is to use composite GIN key which consists of hashes of hstore key and value. Thus, search for @> operator is possible as simple match for each queried key-value pair. Search for @>, ?, ?|, ?& is possible as partial match for each queried hstore key. Recheck is essential for every kind of search, because of possible hash collision. Hashing provides small size of index, mixing key and value into same GIN key provides high performance for @> search operator.

Authors

Alexander Korotkov aekorotkov@gmail.com, Intaro Soft Ltd., Moscow, Russia
Oleg Bartunov oleg@sai.msu.su, Moscow University, Moscow, Russia

License

Development version, available on github, released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (June 1991).

Downloads

Stable version of hstore_ops is available from
https://github.com/akorotkov/hstore_ops

Installation

hstore_ops is regular PostgreSQL extension depending on hstore contrib. To build and install it you should ensure in following:

You have development package of PostgreSQL installed or you built PostgreSQL from source.
Your PATH variable configured so that pg_config command available.
You did "CREATE EXTENSION hstore;" before "CREATE EXTENSION hstore_ops;".

Typical installation procedure may look like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/akorotkov/hstore_ops.git
$ cd hstore_ops
$ make USE_PGXS=1
$ sudo make USE_PGXS=1 install
$ make USE_PGXS=1 installcheck
$ psql DB -c "CREATE EXTENSION hstore_ops;"

Usage

Just create index on hstore column using following command.

CREATE INDEX index_name ON table_name USING GIN (column_name gin_hstore_hash_ops);