Re: [HACKERS] Bug#48582: psql spends hours computing results it already knows (fwd) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Brian E Gallew
Subject Re: [HACKERS] Bug#48582: psql spends hours computing results it already knows (fwd)
Date
Msg-id emacs-smtp-1573-14361-2556-312146@export.andrew.cmu.edu
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: [HACKERS] Bug#48582: psql spends hours computing results it already knows (fwd)  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: [HACKERS] Bug#48582: psql spends hours computing results it already knows (fwd)
List pgsql-hackers
Then <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> spoke up and said:
> The short answer to this is that maintaining a perfectly accurate tuple
> count on-the-fly would almost certainly cost more, totalled over all
> operations that modify a table, than we could ever hope to make back
> by short-circuiting "select count(*)" operations.  (Consider
> concurrent transactions running in multiple backends, some of which
> may abort instead of committing, and others of which may already have
> committed but your transaction is not supposed to be able to see their
> effects...)

So, does the planner allow counting from a unique index (if one
exists)?  In general, an index scan on a unique index should be faster
than a table scan.  Of course, I'm sure someone already thought of this...

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