On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 04:18:03PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > COUNT(*) very slow > As someone else has pointed out, it's only slow if you've got a large > dataset. There's certainly workarounds for this issue (generally > involving a couple of functions for keeping track of the number of > rows). In this way, Postgres actually gives the user the flexibility > to choose the performance loss on insert/deletes which is necessary to > track the number of rows seperately, or not to.
Actually, I think the real issue here is that unlike every other database I've used, PostgreSQL can't do covering index scans, where only the index is read and not the base table. This is due to not having MVCC visibility info in the index. But there has been discussion on -hackers about a way to get close to this behavior; something along the lines of setting a bit in the index once a tuple is visible to all running transactions. This would be a win on larger indexes that don't have a lot of insert/update/delete activity. -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
