PostgreSQL BRIN Indexes: When & How to Use Block Range Indexes

Title: PostgreSQL BRIN Indexes: When & How to Use Block Range Indexes

URL Source: https://medium.com/@philmcc/postgresql-brin-indexes-when-how-to-use-block-range-indexes-e1b40fe96170?source=rss------data_science-5

Published Time: 2026-04-18T16:26:10Z

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# PostgreSQL BRIN Indexes: When & How to Use Block Range Indexes | by Philip McClarence | Apr, 2026 | Medium

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# PostgreSQL BRIN Indexes: When & How to Use Block Range Indexes

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What if I told you that the best index for your largest table might be smaller than this article? BRIN indexes are PostgreSQL’s best-kept secret for time-series and append-only workloads. I recently swapped a 14 GB B-tree for a 90 KB BRIN on a billion-row event table. The B-tree was consuming more disk than some of our smaller databases. The BRIN index delivers the same query performance for range scans while occupying roughly 0.001% of the space. But BRIN is not a universal replacement — it depends on a specific physical property of your data that most developers have never checked. Understanding that property is the key to knowing whether BRIN will save you gigabytes or waste your time.

## The Physical Correlation Requirement

BRIN stores min/max value summaries for rang