At 21:14 19/04/01 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>Philip Warner <pjw@rhyme.com.au> writes:
>> I'm not sure you want to know how well sorted it is in general, but you do
>> want to know the expected cost in IOs of reading all records from a given
>> index node, so you can more accurately estimate indexscan costs. AFAICS it
>> does not require that the entire table be sorted. So checking the pointers
>> on the index nodes gives an idea of clustering.
>
>But you don't really need to look at the index (if it even exists
>at the time you do the ANALYZE). The extent to which the data is
>ordered in the table is a property of the table, not the index.
But the value (and cost) of using a specific index in an indexscan depends
on that index (or am I missing something?).
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