Block Range Index
database indexing technique
A Block Range Index or BRIN is a database indexing technique. They are intended to improve performance with extremely large tables.
BRIN indexes provide similar benefits to horizontal partitioning or sharding but without needing to explicitly declare partitions.
A BRIN is applicable to an index on a table that is large and where the index key value is easily sorted and evaluated with a MinMax function.
BRIN were originally proposed by Alvaro Herrera of 2ndQuadrant in 2013 as 'Minmax indexes'. Implementations thus far are tightly coupled to internal implementation and storage techniques for the database tables. This makes them efficient, but limits them to particular vendors. So far PostgreSQL is the only vendor to have announced a live product with this specific feature, in PostgreSQL 9.5. Other vendors have described some similar features, including Oracle, Netezza 'zone maps', Infobright 'data packs', MonetDB and Apache Hive with ORC/Parquet.
Design
BRIN operate by "summarising" large blocks of data into a compact form, which can be efficiently tested to exclude many of them from a database query, early on.
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