Re: LIKE search and performance

On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 09:13:25AM +0100, Richard Huxton wrote:
> mark(at)mark(dot)mielke(dot)cc wrote:
> >>And since it's basically impossible to know the selectivity of this kind
> >>of where condition, I doubt the planner would ever realistically want to
> >>choose that plan anyway because of its poor worst-case behavior.
> >What is a real life example where an intelligent and researched
> >database application would issue a like or ilike query as their
> >primary condition in a situation where they expected very high
> >selectivity?
> >Avoiding a poor worst-case behaviour for a worst-case behaviour that
> >won't happen doesn't seem practical.
> But if you are also filtering on e.g. date, and that has an index with
> good selectivity, you're never going to use the text index anyway are
> you? If you've only got a dozen rows to check against, might as well
> just read them in.
> The only time it's worth considering the behaviour at all is *if* the
> worst-case is possible.

I notice you did not provide a real life example as requested. :-)

This seems like an ivory tower restriction. Not allowing best performance
in a common situation vs not allowing worst performance in a not-so-common
situation.

Cheers,
mark

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