Block Range Index (BRIN)

An index type designed for handling very large tables where columns have some natural correlation with their physical location within the table

A Block Range Index (BRIN) is an index type designed for handling very large tables in which certain columns have some natural correlation with their physical location within the table.

Support for BRIN indexes was added in PostgreSQL 9.5.

Change history

PostgreSQL 14
- support for bloom indexes added (commit 77b88cd1)
- support for minmax-multi indexes added (commit 77b88cd1)
PostgreSQL 10
- auto-summarization added (commit 7526e102)
- de-summarization support via brin summarize range() and brin desummarize range() functions added (commit c655899b)
- cost estimation improvements (commit 7e534adc)
PostgreSQL 9.5
- added (initial commit 7516f525)

References

PostgreSQL documentation: BRIN Indexes

Useful links

Indexes in PostgreSQL — 9 (BRIN) - October 2020 article by Postgres Professional
Avoiding the Pitfalls of BRIN Indexes in Postgres - August 2020 blog article by Crunchy Data
Loading Tables and Creating B-tree and Block Range Indexes - October 2014 blog article by 2ndQuadrant
Block Range Index - Wikipedia article

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Block Range Index (BRIN)

Change history

References

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