The intarray module provides a number of useful functions
and operators for manipulating null-free arrays of integers.
There is also support for indexed searches using some of the operators.
All of these operations will throw an error if a supplied array contains any NULL elements.
Many of these operations are only sensible for one-dimensional arrays. Although they will accept input arrays of more dimensions, the data is treated as though it were a linear array in storage order.
intarray Functions and Operators
The functions provided by the intarray module
are shown in Table F.9, the operators
in Table F.10.
Table F.9. intarray Functions
Table F.10. intarray Operators
| Operator | Returns | Description |
|---|---|---|
int[] && int[] | boolean | overlap — true if arrays have at least one common element |
int[] @> int[] | boolean | contains — true if left array contains right array |
int[] <@ int[] | boolean | contained — true if left array is contained in right array |
# int[] | int | number of elements in array |
int[] # int | int | index (same as idx function) |
int[] + int | int[] | push element onto array (add it to end of array) |
int[] + int[] | int[] | array concatenation (right array added to the end of left one) |
int[] - int | int[] | remove entries matching right argument from array |
int[] - int[] | int[] | remove elements of right array from left |
int[] | int | int[] | union of arguments |
int[] | int[] | int[] | union of arrays |
int[] & int[] | int[] | intersection of arrays |
int[] @@ query_int | boolean | true if array satisfies query (see below) |
query_int ~~ int[] | boolean | true if array satisfies query (commutator of @@) |
(Before PostgreSQL 8.2, the containment operators @> and
<@ were respectively called @ and ~.
These names are still available, but are deprecated and will eventually be
retired. Notice that the old names are reversed from the convention
formerly followed by the core geometric data types!)
The operators &&, @> and
<@ are equivalent to PostgreSQL's built-in
operators of the same names, except that they work only on integer arrays
that do not contain nulls, while the built-in operators work for any array
type. This restriction makes them faster than the built-in operators
in many cases.
The @@ and ~~ operators test whether an array
satisfies a query, which is expressed as a value of a
specialized data type query_int. A query
consists of integer values that are checked against the elements of
the array, possibly combined using the operators &
(AND), | (OR), and ! (NOT). Parentheses
can be used as needed. For example,
the query 1&(2|3) matches arrays that contain 1
and also contain either 2 or 3.
intarray provides index support for the
&&, @>, <@,
and @@ operators, as well as regular array equality.
Two GiST index operator classes are provided:
gist__int_ops (used by default) is suitable for
small- to medium-size data sets, while
gist__intbig_ops uses a larger signature and is more
suitable for indexing large data sets (i.e., columns containing
a large number of distinct array values).
The implementation uses an RD-tree data structure with
built-in lossy compression.
There is also a non-default GIN operator class
gin__int_ops supporting the same operators.
The choice between GiST and GIN indexing depends on the relative performance characteristics of GiST and GIN, which are discussed elsewhere.
-- a message can be in one or more “sections”
CREATE TABLE message (mid INT PRIMARY KEY, sections INT[], ...);
-- create specialized index
CREATE INDEX message_rdtree_idx ON message USING GIST (sections gist__int_ops);
-- select messages in section 1 OR 2 - OVERLAP operator
SELECT message.mid FROM message WHERE message.sections && '{1,2}';
-- select messages in sections 1 AND 2 - CONTAINS operator
SELECT message.mid FROM message WHERE message.sections @> '{1,2}';
-- the same, using QUERY operator
SELECT message.mid FROM message WHERE message.sections @@ '1&2'::query_int;
The source directory contrib/intarray/bench contains a
benchmark test suite, which can be run against an installed
PostgreSQL server. (It also requires DBD::Pg
to be installed.) To run:
cd .../contrib/intarray/bench createdb TEST psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION intarray" TEST ./create_test.pl | psql TEST ./bench.pl
The bench.pl script has numerous options, which
are displayed when it is run without any arguments.
All work was done by Teodor Sigaev (<[email protected]>) and
Oleg Bartunov (<[email protected]>). See
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/ for
additional information. Andrey Oktyabrski did a great work on adding new
functions and operations.