Interesting catch, I will try to test the behavior of 'DELETE vs
multiple TRUNCATE'.
I'll post it here, If I discover any amazing results.
On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Daniel Farina <daniel@heroku.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au> wrote:
>> 1) Truncate each table. It is too slow, I think, especially for empty
>> tables.
>>
>> Really?!? TRUNCATE should be extremely fast, especially on empty tables.
>>
>> You're aware that you can TRUNCATE many tables in one run, right?
>>
>> TRUNCATE TABLE a, b, c, d, e, f, g;
>
> I have seen in "trivial" cases -- in terms of data size -- where
> TRUNCATE is much slower than a full-table DELETE. The most common use
> case for that is rapid setup/teardown of tests, where it can add up
> quite quickly and in a very big way. This is probably an artifact the
> speed of one's file system to truncate and/or unlink everything.
>
> I haven't tried a multi-truncate though. Still, I don't know a
> mechanism besides slow file system truncation time that would explain
> why DELETE would be significantly faster.
>
> --
> fdr
