Hi Dilip!
Global Indexes is a very interesting functionality that has both significant advantages
and drawbacks, and the community seems not ready to accept it without very strong
motivation.
There was a more recent approach to Global index problem [1], please check it out.
I've read you proposal and have several questions:
1) New catalog table with global index partitions would immediately affect interaction
with user tables with global indexes because of corresponding locks that should be
taken for [in]validation and attach/detach operations, this should be investigated;
2) Changing relation OIDs (by, say, vacuum full) would immediately result in index
inconsistency, what do you suppose to do with internal processes that could change
relation OIDs? Also this question
3) Would single sort space be enough for a more typical case when we have
hundreds of partitions with hundreds of millions records in each? It is a normal
production case for partitioned tables.
4) Update-heavy partitioned tables that should run vacuum frequently. Significant
vacuum slowdown would result in going beyond SLAs without corresponding
significant improvements.
