My Postgres Story: GIN and FTS
After ten years of working with postgres ( actually, I started with Ingres, then postgres95), I and Teodor got a chance to see live other developers. We presented there GIN and FTS. Pictures from the Anniversary Summit at at Ryerson University in Toronto can be viewed on the flickr under name PGCon-2006, I hope many of us will enjoy looking back 17 years, how young we were !
After implementing GiST index for FTS, I started thinking about better scalable indexing and eventually came to idea of inverted indexes just looking to the index pages in the scientific books, then I found a lot of scientific papers regarding search engines and inverted indexes, but I thought about online indexing in Postgres with support of various data types. We already worked on GiST (Generalized Search Tree), originally developed in Berkeley by Joseph Hellerstein (recently, hi acknowledged us in his essay Looking Back to Postgres "the last contribution may have been my GiST implementation in the latter half of the 1990s-but even that was rewritten and cleaned up substantially by open-source volunteers (from Russia, in that case)". So, we didn't think much on the name of new index AM - Generalized Inverted Index, with extensible API to support extensible set of data types (btw, GiST and GIN demonstrated the nested extensibility of Postgres). We implemented GIN during our work in JFG Networks company in beautiful Toulouse, which we acknowledged in src/backend/access/gin/README
Our slides.
Participants of the PostgreSQL Anniversary Meeting in Toronto, July 8-9, 2006. Someone made this picture on Álvaro's Canon, which he bought day earlier.
We were really worried about our spoken english, especially Teodor, but I remembered famous academician Yakov B. Zeldovich, who once said me, that many foreigners come to him to talk and it's their duty to understand his "russian-style english". I said Teodor, that what we did is very important for Postgres and we shouldn't confuse, see the titles of other talks to compare (unfortunately, conference site is down). The time has proven my words - GIN index and FTS (full-text search) are used everywhere and I am very proud for my contribution to open source, to Postgres.
Thanks to all, who helped me and Teodor, it would be impossible to us to attend the conference !