Re: Help speeding up delete

Steve Wampler <swampler(at)noao(dot)edu> writes:
> We've got an older system in production (PG 7.2.4). Recently
> one of the users has wanted to implement a selective delete,
> but is finding that the time it appears to take exceeds her
> patience factor by several orders of magnitude. Here's
> a synopsis of her report. It appears that the "WHERE
> id IN ..." is resulting in a seq scan that is causing
> the problem, but we're not SQL expert enough to know
> what to do about it.

> Can someone point out what we're doing wrong, or how we
> could get a (much) faster delete? Thanks!

Update to 7.4 or later ;-)

Quite seriously, if you're still using 7.2.4 for production purposes
you could justifiably be accused of negligence. There are three or four
data-loss-grade bugs fixed in the later 7.2.x releases, not to mention
security holes; and that was before we abandoned support for 7.2.
You *really* need to be thinking about an update.

regards, tom lane