Re: [HACKERS] "internal error" triggered by EXISTS() - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Bruce Momjian
Subject Re: [HACKERS] "internal error" triggered by EXISTS()
Date
Msg-id 199807150245.WAA02896@candle.pha.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to "internal error" triggered by EXISTS()  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
We only support subqueries in the target list.  May have that expaned
for 6.4.

> I tried the following to find out whether a table has any records
> with field1 < X (for a constant X):
>
> tgl=> SELECT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM table WHERE field1 < X);
> ERROR:  internal error: do not know how to transform targetlist
>
> Is this a bug?  (I'm using development sources from yesterday.)
>
> Am I using EXISTS() incorrectly?  The examples I've been able to find
> only show it as a part of a WHERE clause.
>
> If it did work, would it be any faster than a table scan?  The code
> I was hoping to replace is like this:
>     SELECT COUNT(field1) WHERE field1 < X;
>     // test whether result > 0
> Since aggregates aren't optimized very well, this ends up reading
> much or all of the table, even if there is an index for field1.
> I was hoping EXISTS() might be smarter...
>
>             regards, tom lane
>
>


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