Re: Unexpected expensive index scan

On 9/28/16 1:11 PM, Jake Nielsen wrote:
> Beautiful! After changing the random_page_cost to 1.0 the original query
> went from ~3.5s to ~35ms. This is exactly the kind of insight I was
> fishing for in the original post. I'll keep in mind that the query
> planner is very tunable and has these sorts of hardware-related
> trade-offs in the future. I can't thank you enough!

Be careful with setting random_page_cost to exactly 1... that tells the
planner that an index scan has nearly the same cost as a sequential
scan, which is absolutely never the case, even with the database in
memory. 1.1 or maybe even 1.01 is probably a safer bet.

Also note that you can set those parameters within a single session, as
well as within a single transaction. So if you need to force a different
setting for a single query, you could always do

BEGIN;
SET LOCAL random_page_cost = 1;
SELECT ...
COMMIT; (or rollback...)
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
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