OrioleDB's Bridged Indexes: Balancing Speed and Ecosystem

OrioleDB introduces bridged indexes, a clever solution to integrate PostgreSQL's rich ecosystem of non-B-tree indexes (like GIN, GiST) while preserving its MVCC-aware, heap-free architecture. A virtual `iptr` column and a lightweight bridge index map PostgreSQL indexes to OrioleDB's internal structure. This allows support for diverse index types. While adding a slight query overhead (one extra lookup), this cost is often negligible for complex indexes (e.g., pg_vector's ANN search). This innovation lets users leverage their preferred extensions without sacrificing performance.