I don't see anything in the assignment statements (sigma_* :=) which would prevent one from doing all three of them within a single for loop. In fact, written as is there's some chance the values of the sigma_*s might change between repeated calls to the function since there is no explicit ordering of the rows returned from table blah. Putting all the assignments into a single select from blah would at least say that the sigma values are from the same dataset per run.

As to efficiency in general, I would expect the entire table (~50 rows) would be entirely in memory after the first select, but you plan triples the time in the loop. This expense would likely only be noticeable if the function itself is called /lots/.

Gary Chambers wrote:
All...

In the poly_example function below, I am emulating an actual
requirement by querying the same table three (3) times in order to
derive a solution to a problem.  Is this the best or most efficient
and effective way to implement this?  The table (which consists of
only five (5) FLOAT8 columns) I'm querying contains less than 50 rows.
 Thanks in advance for any insight or criticisms you offer.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION poly_example() RETURNS SETOF FLOAT8 AS
$poly_example$
DECLARE
    term blah%ROWTYPE;
    sigma_l FLOAT8 := 0.0;
    sigma_b FLOAT8 := 0.0;
    sigma_r FLOAT8 := 0.0;

BEGIN
    FOR term in SELECT * FROM blah LOOP
        sigma_l := sigma_l + (RANDOM() * 100) * (term.i * term.i) +
                RANDOM() * (term.j * term.j) + term.k;
    END LOOP;

    FOR term in SELECT * FROM blah LOOP
        sigma_b := sigma_b + (RANDOM() * 53) * (term.i * term.i) +
                (RANDOM() * 5) * (term.j * term.j) + term.k;
    END LOOP;

    FOR term in SELECT * FROM blah LOOP
        sigma_r := sigma_r + 96.232234 * (term.i * term.i) +
                0.32322325 * (term.j * term.j) + term.k;
    END LOOP;

    RETURN NEXT sigma_l + sigma_b + sigma_r;
END;
$poly_example$ LANGUAGE plpgsql STRICT IMMUTABLE;

-- Gary Chambers

/* Nothing fancy and nothing Microsoft! */



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