Re: Need indexes on empty tables for good performance ?

Rohan,

You should note that in Postgres, indexes are not inherited by child
tables.

Also, it seems difficult to select from a child table whose name you
don't know unless you access the parent. And if you are accessing the
data via the parent, I'm reasonably certain that you will find that
indexes aren't used (even if they exist on the children) as a result
of the way the children are accessed.

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Thomas F. O'Connell
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On Aug 22, 2005, at 10:41 PM, Lenard, Rohan (Rohan) wrote:

> I've read that indexes aren't used for COUNT(*) and I've noticed
> (7.3.x) with EXPLAIN that indexes never seem to be used on empty
> tables - is there any reason to have indexes on empty tables, or
> will postgresql never use them.
>
> This is not as silly as it sounds - with table inheritance you
> might have table children with the data and a parent that is
> empty. It'd be nice to make sure postgresql knows to never really
> look at the parent - especially is you don't know the names of all
> the children ..
>
> Thoughts ?
>
> thx,
> Rohan