Re: Improving a simple query?

On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 08:09:17PM +0100, Richard Huxton wrote:
> > I'm not an SQL or PostgreSQL expert.
> >
> > I'm getting abysmal performance on a nested query and
> > need some help on finding ways to improve the performance:
> [snip]
> > select * from attributes_table where id in (select id from
> > attributes where (name='obsid') and (value='oid00066'));
>
> This is the classic IN problem (much improved in 7.4 dev I believe). The
> recommended approach is to rewrite the query as an EXISTS form if
> possible. See the mailing list archives for plenty of examples.
>
> Could you not rewrite this as a simple join though?

Hmmm, I don't see how. Then again, I'm pretty much the village
idiot w.r.t. SQL...

The inner select is locating a set of (2049) ids (actually from
the same table, since 'attributes' is just a view into
'attributes_table'). The outer select is then locating all
records (~30-40K) that have any of those ids. Is that really
something a JOIN could be used for?

-Steve
--
Steve Wampler -- swampler(at)noao(dot)edu
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota
monax materiam possit materiari?