Odd sorting behaviour

[Please CC me on all replies, I'm not subscribed to this list]

Hi,

I'm trying to find out why one of my queries is so slow -- I'm primarily
using PostgreSQL 7.2 (Debian stable), but I don't really get much better
performance with 7.4 (Debian unstable). My prototype table looks like this:

CREATE TABLE opinions (
prodid INTEGER NOT NULL,
uid INTEGER NOT NULL,
opinion INTEGER NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY ( prodid, uid )
);

In addition, there are separate indexes on prodid and uid. I've run VACUUM
ANALYZE before all queries, and they are repeatable. (If anybody needs the
data, that could be arranged -- it's not secret or anything :-) ) My query
looks like this:

EXPLAIN ANALYZE
SELECT o3.prodid, SUM(o3.opinion*o12.correlation) AS total_correlation FROM opinions o3
RIGHT JOIN (
SELECT o2.uid, SUM(o1.opinion*o2.opinion)/SQRT(count(*)+0.0) AS correlation
FROM opinions o1 LEFT JOIN opinions o2 ON o1.prodid=o2.prodid
WHERE o1.uid=1355
GROUP BY o2.uid
) o12 ON o3.uid=o12.uid
LEFT JOIN (
SELECT o4.prodid, COUNT(*) as num_my_comments
FROM opinions o4
WHERE o4.uid=1355
GROUP BY o4.prodid
) nmc ON o3.prodid=nmc.prodid
WHERE nmc.num_my_comments IS NULL AND o3.opinion<>0 AND o12.correlation<>0
GROUP BY o3.prodid
ORDER BY total_correlation desc;

And produces the query plan at

http://www.samfundet.no/~sesse/queryplan.txt

(The lines were a bit too long to include in an e-mail :-) ) Note that the
"o3.opinion<>0 AND o12.correleation<>0" lines are an optimization; I can run
the query fine without them and it will produce the same results, but it
goes slower both in 7.2 and 7.4.

There are a few oddities here:

- The "subquery scan o12" phase outputs 1186 rows, yet 83792 are sorted. Where
do the other ~82000 rows come from? And why would it take ~100ms to sort the
rows at all? (In earlier tests, this was _one full second_ but somehow that
seems to have improved, yet without really improving the overall query time.
shared_buffers is 4096 and sort_mem is 16384, so it should really fit into
RAM.)
- Why does it use uid_index for an index scan on the table, when it obviously
has no filter on it (since it returns all the rows)? Furthermore, why would
this take half a second? (The machine is a 950MHz machine with SCSI disks.)
- Also, the outer sort (the sorting of the 58792 rows from the merge join)
is slow. :-)

7.4 isn't really much better:

http://www.samfundet.no/~sesse/queryplan74.txt

Note that this is run on a machine with almost twice the speed (in terms of
CPU speed, at least). The same oddities are mostly present (such as o12
returning 1186 rows, but 58788 rows are sorted), so I really don't understand
what's going on here. Any ideas on how to improve this?

/* Steinar */
--
Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/