Re: [HACKERS] Slow count(*) again...

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Mladen Gogala
<mladen(dot)gogala(at)vmsinfo(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 It would be pretty hard to make autoanalyze work on
>> such tables
>> without removing some of the performance benefits of having such
>> tables in the first place - namely, the local buffer manager.  But you
>> could ANALYZE them by hand.
>>
>>
>
> Not necessarily autoanalyze, some default rules for the situations when
> stats is not there should be put in place,
> like the following:
> 1) If there is a usable index on the temp table - use it.
> 2) It there isn't a usable index on the temp table and there is a join, make
> the temp table the first table
>   in the nested loop join.
>
> People are complaining about the optimizer not using the indexes all over
> the place, there should be a way to
> make the optimizer explicitly prefer the indexes, like was the case with
> Oracle's venerable RBO (rules based
> optimizer). RBO didn't use statistics, it had a rank of access method and
> used the access method with the highest
> rank of all available access methods. In practice, it translated into: if an
> index exists - use it.

However, sometimes using an index results in a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE plan.
I recently encountered the issue myself, and plopping an ANALYZE
$tablename in there, since I was using a temporary table anyway, make
all the difference. The planner switched from an index-based query to
a sequential scan, and a sequential scan was (is) vastly more
efficient in this particular case.

Personally, I'd get rid of autovacuum/autoanalyze support on temporary
tables (they typically have short lives and are often accessed
immediately after creation preventing the auto* stuff from being
useful anyway), *AND* every time I ask I'm always told "make sure
ANALYZE the table before you use it".

--
Jon