Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Phoenix Kiula
Subject Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question
Date
Msg-id e373d31e0708150748i7447338dlf3634882c18879a2@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question  (Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com>)
Responses Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question  ("Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>)
Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question  (Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com>)
List pgsql-general
On 15/08/07, Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> "Phoenix Kiula" <phoenix.kiula@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > I'm grappling with a lot of reporting code for our app that relies on
> > queries such as:
> >
> >      SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TABLE WHERE ....(conditions)...
> >...
> > The number of such possibilities for multiple WHERE conditions is
> > infinite...
>
> Depends on the "conditions" bit. You can't solve all of the infinite
> possibilities -- well you can, just run the query above -- but if you want > to do better it's all about
understandingyour data. 


I am not sure what the advice here is. The WHERE condition comes from
the indices. So if the query was not "COUNT(*)" but just a couple of
columns, the query executes in less than a second. Just that COUNT(*)
becomes horribly slow. And since the file system based query caching
feature of PG is unclear to me (I am just moving from MySQL where the
cache is quite powerful) I don't quite know what to do to speed up
these queries!

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