Re: COUNT & Pagination - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Rajesh Kumar Mallah
Subject Re: COUNT & Pagination
Date
Msg-id 400586CA.6090208@trade-india.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: COUNT & Pagination  ("scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>)
Responses Re: COUNT & Pagination
List pgsql-performance
scott.marlowe wrote:
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, David Shadovitz wrote:
 
We avert the subsequent execution of count(*) by passing the
value of count(*) as a query parameter through the link in page
numbers.     
Mallah, and others who mentioned caching the record count:

Yes, I will certainly do this.  I can detect whether the query's filter has 
been changed, or whether the user is merely paging through the results or 
sorting* the results.

I'd love to completely eliminate the cost of the COUNT(*) query, but I guess 
that I cannot have everything.

* My HTML table column headers are hyperlinks which re-execute the query, 
sorting the results by the selected column.  The first click does an ASC 
sort; a second click does a DESC sort.   
another useful trick is to have your script save out the count(*) result 
in a single row table with a timestamp, and every time you grab if, check 
to see if x number of minutes have passed, and if so, update that row with 
a count(*). 

Greetings!

The count(*) can get evaluated with any arbitrary combination
in whre clause how do you plan to store that information ?

In a typical application pagination could be required in n number
of contexts . I would be interested to know more about this trick
and its applicability in such situations.

Offtopic:

Does PostgreSQL optimise repeated execution of similar queries ie
queries on same table or set of tables (in a join) with same where clause
 and only differing in LIMIT and OFFSET.

I dont know much about MySQL, Is their "Query Cache" achieving
better results in such cases? and do we have anything similar in
PostgreSQL ? I think  the most recently accessed tables  anyways
get loaded in shared buffers in PostgreSQL  so that its not accessed
from the disk. But is the "Query Cache" really different from this.
Can anyone knowing a little better about the working of MySQLs'
query cache throw some light?

Regds
Mallah.

 You can even have a cron job do it so your own scripts don't 
incur the cost of the count(*) and delay output to the user.



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