Author: Rajkumar Raghuwanshi

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, we explored PostgreSQL’s native indexes (B-tree, GIN, GiST, HASH, BRIN) and specialized extension-based index types (SP-GiST, btree_gin, btree_gist). In this post, we dive into three additional extensions: Bloom (for space-efficient multi-column equality filtering), pg_trgm (for fuzzy text matching and similarity searches), and pg_bigm (for full-text search optimized for Asian languages)

In this post, the third in the series, we dive into three extension-based index types: SP-GiST, btree_gin, and btree_gist. These are available in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL’s index infrastructure is extensible. Operator classes define how indexes behave for specific data types and operations. The SP-GiST, btree_gin, and btree_gist extensions take advantage of this extensibility to give you additional indexing strategies beyond the native options. We walk through when to use each extension, the data types they support, and practical examples that demonstrate their performance benefits.

In this series of posts, we discuss index types supported in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL and their use cases. In this post, we discuss the native B-tree index and its variations.