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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title>64.1. Introduction</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css" /><link rev="made" href="pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org" /><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets Vsnapshot" /><link rel="prev" href="gist.html" title="Chapter 64. GiST Indexes" /><link rel="next" href="gist-builtin-opclasses.html" title="64.2. Built-in Operator Classes" /></head><body><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/transitional" class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="5" align="center">64.1. Introduction</th></tr><tr><td width="10%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="gist.html" title="Chapter 64. GiST Indexes">Prev</a> </td><td width="10%" align="left"><a accesskey="u" href="gist.html" title="Chapter 64. GiST Indexes">Up</a></td><th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 64. GiST Indexes</th><td width="10%" align="right"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html" title="PostgreSQL 11.5 Documentation">Home</a></td><td width="10%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="gist-builtin-opclasses.html" title="64.2. Built-in Operator Classes">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr></hr></div><div class="sect1" id="GIST-INTRO"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">64.1. Introduction</h2></div></div></div><p>
<acronym class="acronym">GiST</acronym> stands for Generalized Search Tree. It is a
balanced, tree-structured access method, that acts as a base template in
which to implement arbitrary indexing schemes. B-trees, R-trees and many
other indexing schemes can be implemented in <acronym class="acronym">GiST</acronym>.
</p><p>
One advantage of <acronym class="acronym">GiST</acronym> is that it allows the development
of custom data types with the appropriate access methods, by
an expert in the domain of the data type, rather than a database expert.
</p><p>
Some of the information here is derived from the University of California
at Berkeley's GiST Indexing Project
<a class="ulink" href="http://gist.cs.berkeley.edu/" target="_top">web site</a> and
Marcel Kornacker's thesis,
<a class="ulink" href="http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/papers/concurrency/access-methods-for-next-generation.pdf.gz" target="_top">
Access Methods for Next-Generation Database Systems</a>.
The <acronym class="acronym">GiST</acronym>
implementation in <span class="productname">PostgreSQL</span> is primarily
maintained by Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov, and there is more
information on their
<a class="ulink" href="http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/" target="_top">web site</a>.
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