Message-ID: <3C3F1A7A.7020404@pacifier.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:01:46 -0800
From: Don Baccus <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011221
MIME-Version: 1.0
CC: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: again on index usage
References: <200201111642.g0BGghR14522@candle.pha.pa.us>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Bruce Momjian wrote:


>>Oracle partially mitigates the second effect by refusing to trash its 
>>entire buffer cache on any given sequential scan.  Or so I've been told 
>>by people who know Oracle well.  A repeat of the sequential scan will 
>>still have to reread the entire table but that's true anyway if the 
>>table's at least one block longer than available cache.
>>
> 
> That is on our TODO list, at least.


I didn't realize this, it's good news.  (I don't follow PG development 
closely these days).

BTW overall I think the cost-estimating portion of the PG optimizer does 
about as well as Oracle's.   Oracle is a lot smarter about doing 
transformations of certain types of queries (turning "scalar in (select 
...)" into something akin to an "exists") but of course this has nothing 
to do with estimating the cost of index vs. sequential scans.


-- 
Don Baccus
Portland, OR
http://donb.photo.net, http://birdnotes.net, http://openacs.org