Thread: [PERFORM] Inefficient max query when using group by

On 4 May 2017 at 22:52,  <jesse.hietanen@vaisala.com> wrote:
> I have a performance problem with my query. As a simplified example, I have
> a table called Book, which has three columns: id, released (timestamp) and
> author_id. I have a need to search for the latest books released by multiple
> authors, at a specific point in the history. This could be latest book
> between beginning of time and now, or latest book released last year etc. In
> other words, only the latest book for each author, in specific time window.
> I have also a combined index for released and author_id columns.
>
> First, I tried a simple query that selects maximum value of released and the
> author_id, which are grouped by the author_id (then later do a join by these
> author_id, released columns to get the whole rows).  Performance of this
> query is pretty bad (Execution time around 250-300ms for five authors). See
> query and query plan in the link below:
>
> https://gist.github.com/jehie/ca9fac16b6e3c19612d815446a0e1bc0
>
>
>
> The execution time seems to grow linearly when the number of author_ids
> increase (50ms per author_id). I don’t completely understand why it takes so
> long for this query to execute and why it does not use the directional index
> scan?
>
> I also tried second query using limit (where I can only ask for one
> author_id at a time, so cannot use this directly when searching for books of
> multiple author), which performs nicely (0.2ms):
>
> https://gist.github.com/jehie/284e7852089f6debe22e05c63e73027f
>
>
>
> So, any ideas how to make multiple-author lookups (like in the first query)
> perform better? Or any other ideas?

Yes, you could sidestep the whole issue by using a LATERAL join.

Something like:

EXPLAIN ANALYZE
SELECT b.released, b.author_id
FROM (VALUES('1'),('2'),('3'),('4'),('5')) a (author_id)
CROSS JOIN LATERAL (SELECT released, author_id
     FROM book
      WHERE author_id = a.author_id
AND released<=to_timestamp(2e9)
AND released>=to_timestamp(0)
ORDER BY released desc
         LIMIT 1) b;

or you could write a function which just runs that query. Although,
with the above or the function method, if you give this enough
authors, then it'll eventually become slower than the problem query.
Perhaps if you know the number of authors will not be too great, then
you'll be ok.

--
 David Rowley                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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