speeding up big query lookup

This is a question on speeding up some type of queries.

I have a very big table that catalogs measurements of some objects over
time. Measurements can be of several (~10) types. It keeps the
observation date in a field, and indicates the type of measurement in
another field.

I often need to get the latest measurement of type A for object X.

The table is indexed by object_id.

The obvoious way to get the latest measurement of type A would be to
join the table against

SELECT object_id, object_val_type_id, max(observation_date)
FROM object_val
GROUP BY object_id, object_val_type_id

But this can take a long time, and needs to be done very often.

Next strategy was to build an auxiliary table that just keeps the last
measurement of each type, for each object. I defined triggers to keep
this table up to date whenever the object_val table was updated.

However I don't trust this as much, and though it helps performance in
reads, I'm not sure it's the best option overall.

I found that Postgres can use indexes on pairs, so I'm going to play
with indexing object_val by (object_id, object_val_type_id), and I'm
sure my original JOIN query will be much faster.

But I'm sure many people have this type of problem. Is there a smarter
way to deal with this? I'd love to be able to choose the row with max
value of some of the fields with just one statement, but I think this
can't be done?

Thanks
Jaime

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