Postgres: Are secondary indexes included in ACID? Are non-unique indexes / indices covered under the Consistency clause in aCid? (same for other attributes of an index that do not place constraints on the data) I am seeing certain performance issues (benefits, actually) in Postgres that make me wonder if they are.

Given that indexes / indices are not first-class objects (i.e. you can't access them directly in Postgres, nor can you request their use), I see no reason at all why Postgres would be REQUIRED to support this. I can find no definition of ACID that says "indexes have to absolutely complete and not be hacked up before the transaction can finish".

Under certain conditions that do not place restrictions on the insert (such as the index not being unique), the index could essentially be "invalidated" (i.e. "don't use it until I'm finished reindexing"), or flags can be set that says "the index does not cover the following ranges".

If Postgres played this trick, the copy from operator could be made exceedingly swift (which is what I am seeing), similarly for massive insert counts in a transaction.

I'm not just making this up...

While Redshift is a bad example, Amazon weasels out of Consistency by playing tricks with how it stores the (one and only) sort key (essentially a primary index-ish construct in Redshift). Until one performs a vacuum command, the primary key just keeps getting worse and worse and your database starts becoming a black hole: queries go in, but no results come out.

Clearly, an internalized vacuum regimen would prevent the Redshift silliness that often occurs during mass imports.
Are non-unique indexes / indices covered under the Consistency clause in aCid?


Yes. Any violation of that would be considered a bug in PostgreSQL.

The docs you quoted are cases where postgres might have to temporarily scan the heap instead of doing an index-only scan or otherwise do extra work to get a consistent result.

For example, both BRIN and GIN indexes accumulate batches of pending changes and then do batch updates. When the indexes are used in queries this queue is also scanned to make sure that a current, up-to-date and consistent view is seen.

If an index is currently invalid it'll be skipped by the planner and won't be used by queries.

Redshift isn't really PostgreSQL, it just happens to share the same front-end and protocol. Drawing comparisons based on Redshift will typically just create confusion.