Use of Indexes - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Darrell A. Sullivan, II
Subject Use of Indexes
Date
Msg-id 027201c56d05$09f0d790$3b01a8c0@WS01
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Use of Indexes  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-general
Hello,

I am trying out a few databases to determine which one would best suit a
project.

I was wondering if someone could answer a question about how PostgreSQL uses
indexes when performing queries. Particularly, I need to know if the query
optimizer will use more than index for a query or if it only uses one.

For instance, one of my tables (1 million records) contains a document
number, a document type, a received date, a review date, an entered date,
and an audited date.

If I want to retrieve the following pieces of data:

all of the documents of type 1 that were received yesterday
all of the documents of type 2 that were entered yesterday
all of the documents of type 2 that were reviewed yesterday

Would I be able to create individual indexes on type, received date, entered
date, and reviewed date and the optimizer would select the appropriate two
indexes, or would I have to create three composite indexes that would
include type-received, type-entered, and type-reviewed?

Thanks for the help.

Darrell


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