Implementation of Extended Indexes in POSTGRES

Abstract

The vaunted “Spartan simplicity” of the relational model can limit the usefulness of the relational database management system 1991 for non-traditional applications. For example, there is no natural way to model a keyword index for bibliographic informational retrieval (IR), or any other index whose key values are computed from column values, in a standard RDBMS. The extended indexing proposed in [LYNC88a] is intended to support applications that require indexes on computed values. This paper reports on an implementation of this type of indexing using the POSTGRES extensible database management system [STON86a], focusing on two issues: general problems, and the features in POSTGRES that proved helpful in the solution of these problems. © 1991, ACM. All rights reserved.