Opened 6 years ago
Last modified 21 months ago
#30913 closed New feature
Add support for adding non-key columns to indexes — at Initial Version
| Reported by: | Hannes Ljungberg | Owned by: | nobody |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | Migrations | Version: | dev |
| Severity: | Normal | Keywords: | postgresql covering index include |
| Cc: | Triage Stage: | Ready for checkin | |
| Has patch: | yes | Needs documentation: | no |
| Needs tests: | no | Patch needs improvement: | no |
| Easy pickings: | no | UI/UX: | no |
Description
Postgres got support for the INCLUDE clause in CREATE INDEX. This can be used to add non-key columns to the index.
CREATE INDEX idx
ON t1 ( col1 )
INCLUDE ( col2 )
This allows for Index Only Scans on queries like:
SELECT col1, col2 FROM t1 WHERE t1 = 'foo';
More info:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createindex.html
https://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2019-04/include-columns-in-btree-indexes
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/indexes-index-only-scans.html
The idea is to add an additional kwarg to Index to support this:
Index(
name='some-idx',
fields=['headline'],
include=['pub_date']
One of the biggest possibilities of this feature is to add included columns to unique indexes and use them to perform Index Only Scans. This would require adding the same kwarg to UniqueConstraint. The implementation would be a lot like the condition kwargs to both Index and UniqueConstraint.
At the moment the only Django-supported database that can use this feature is Postgres but it's also supported by Microsoft SQL Server and IBM Db2 with the same syntax. Because if this I think it shouldn't be implemented as a postgres only feature but exposed on BaseDatabaseSchemaEditor to ease the adding of support when/if sqlite or mariadb adds support.
I have a proof of concept I'm working on and will create a PR soon if accepted.