Citus Blog

At Citus we spend a lot of time working with customers on data modeling, optimizing queries, and adding indexes to make things snappy. My goal is to be as available for our customers as we need to be, in order to make you successful. Part of that is keeping your Citus cluster well tuned and performant which we take care of for you. Another part is helping you with everything you need to know about Postgres and Citus. After all a healthy and performant database means a fast performing app and who wouldn’t want that. Today we’re going to condense some of the information we’ve shared directly with customers about Postgres indexes.

Postgres has a number of index types, and with each new release seems to come with another new index type. Each of these indexes can be useful, but which one to use depends on 1. the data type and then sometimes 2. the underlying data within the table, and 3. the types of lookups performed. In what follows we'll look at a quick survey of the index types available to you in Postgres and when you should leverage each. Before we dig in, here’s a quick glimpse of the indexes we’ll walk you through:

• B-Tree
• Generalized Inverted Index (GIN)
• Generalized Inverted Seach Tree (GiST)
• Space partitioned GiST (SP-GiST)
• Block Range Indexes (BRIN)
• Hash

Now onto the indexing

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