On May 13, 2008, at 5:27 PM, Stephen Ince wrote:

I have to do a multicolumn self-join to find the median. I am using postgres 8.2. How do I force postgres to use an index scan? I have a multicolumn index but postgres is not using it.

Query
------------------------------------
explain select e.time
from page_view e, page_view d
where e.test_run_id = d.test_run_id and e.web_resource_id = d.web_resource_id
and e.web_resource_id = 3961 and e.test_run_id = 2

How does that get you the median? It just gives you all the records in page_view e with the same (test_run_id, web_resource_id) tuple. AFAICS you could leave out the entire self-join and get the same results. No wonder it uses a seqscan...

Personally to find the median I'd use a scrolling cursor. Execute your query, ordered by time, using a scrolling cursor; scroll to the last row; determine the row_count from that; scroll back to half way your result set now that you know what size it is.

Alban Hertroys

--
If you can't see the forest for the trees,
cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest.


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