Re: indexing for distinct search in timestamp based table

Thanks for the suggestion. This seems to work pretty well on 8.3, but not so
well on 8.2. We were planning on upgrading to 8.3 soon anyway, we just have
to move up our schedule a bit.

I think that this type of algorithm would make sense in core. I suspect that
being in there some further optimizations could be done that pl/pgsql can't
do.

--Rainer

From: pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Vladimir
Sitnikov
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 12:11 AM
To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] indexing for distinct search in timestamp based table

You might get great improvement for '%' cases using index on
channel_name(<field>, start_time) and a little bit of pl/pgsql

Basically, you need to implement the following algorithm:

1) curr_<field> = ( select min(<field>) from ad_log )

2) record_exists = ( select 1 from ad_log where <field>=cur_<field> and
_all_other_conditions limit 1 )

3) if record_exists==1 then add curr_<field> to the results

3) curr_<field> = (select min(<field>) from ad_log where <field> >
curr_<field> )

4) if curr_<field> is not null then goto 2

I believe it might make sense implement this approach in the core (I would
call it "index distinct scan")

That could dramatically improve "select distinct <column> from <table>" and
"select <column> from <table> group by <column>" kind of queries when there
exists an index on <column> and a particular column has very small number of
distinct values.

For instance: say a table has 10'000'000 rows, while column of interest has
only 20 distinct values. In that case, the database will be able to get
every of those 20 values in virtually 20 index lookups.

What does the community think about that?