Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:16:26 -0600
From: Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org>
To: Aditya Damle <aditya@skillnetinc.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: LIKE search with ending % not optimized in v8
Message-ID: <20050628051626.GA18240@winnie.fuhr.org>
References: <20050622090329.34686.qmail@web32910.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 02:03:29AM -0700, Aditya Damle wrote:
>
> Hello. I believe in earlier versions, a query of the
> form 
> select attrib from ttt where attrib like 'foo%' would
> be able to take advantage of an index. I have seen
> this in the past. Currently I am using v8.0.3. From
> what I can see is that the execultion plan seems to
> use a seq scan and to totally ignore the index. Is
> this the case?

8.0.3 can certainly use indexes for LIKE queries, but the planner
will choose a sequential scan if it thinks that would be faster.
Have you vacuumed and analyzed your tables?  Could you post the
EXPLAIN ANALYZE output of a query, once with enable_seqscan turned
on and once with it turned off?

See also "Operator Classes" in the "Indexes" chapter of the
documentation:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/indexes-opclass.html

What locale are you using?

-- 
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/