Opened 5 years ago

Last modified 9 months ago

#30913 closed New feature

Add support for adding non-key columns to indexes — at Version 2

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 (last modified by Hannes Ljungberg)

Postgres got support for the INCLUDE clause in CREATE INDEX in version 11. 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 col1 = '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.

Change History (2)

comment:1 by Hannes Ljungberg, 5 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:2 by Hannes Ljungberg, 5 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
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