Thread: Column changes such as an increase in varchar size, can cause extremely slow queries, and postgres should run analyze automatically.

In our project lemmy, we recently had a production breaking bug causing extremely slow queries to one of our tables.

Finally after a lot of testing, we narrowed it down to a migration that increased the size of a varchar column meant to store URL data.

This increases the url column from 512 -> 2000 characters.

up.sql:

```sql
ALTER TABLE post
    ALTER COLUMN url TYPE varchar(2000);
```

This table currently has 1,186,895 rows, and joins are occasionally done to that column.

We finally realized that running this simple query manually, fixed the issue:

`ANALYZE post (url);`

I'm sure we're not the only ones to experience this potentially production-breaking bug, and postgres should probably automatically re-run analyze on columns for tables that have a large number of rows, that are changed.

For more context, see: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5148

Thanks everyone,

-- dessalines
On Thu, 2024-10-31 at 14:34 -0400, Tyler wrote:
> In our project lemmy, we recently had a production breaking bug causing extremely
> slow queries to one of our tables.
>
> Finally after a lot of testing, we narrowed it down to a migration that increased
> the size of a varchar column meant to store URL data.
>
> This increases the url column from 512 -> 2000 characters.
>
> ALTER TABLE post
>     ALTER COLUMN url TYPE varchar(2000);
>
> We finally realized that running this simple query manually, fixed the issue:
>
> `ANALYZE post (url);`
>
> I'm sure we're not the only ones to experience this potentially production-breaking bug, and postgres should
> probably automatically re-run analyze on columns for tables that have a large number of rows, that are changed.
>
> For more context, see: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5148

I don't know if that should be considered a bug, but I sympathize with the complaint.

At the very least we should document on
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/routine-vacuuming.html#VACUUM-FOR-STATISTICS
that operations like ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX don't trigger autoanalyze.

Would it be an option to clear pg_class.reltuples and pg_stat_all_tables.n_mod_since_analyze
whenever the statistics for a table are cleared?  Then autoanalyze would trigger after 50
modifications.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe



On Fri, 1 Nov 2024 at 19:32, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> wrote:
> Would it be an option to clear pg_class.reltuples and pg_stat_all_tables.n_mod_since_analyze
> whenever the statistics for a table are cleared?  Then autoanalyze would trigger after 50
> modifications.

I wondered about that too. I also wondered which cases we could have
ATExecAlterColumnType() not call RemoveStatistics(). If the table is
going to be rewritten, then we need to, but there must be plenty of
cases where we could forego removing the stats when there's no
rewrite.

David