Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 13:55:56 -0500
From: Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>
To: Benjamin Arai <benjamin@araisoft.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Question about clustering multiple columns
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	Benjamin Arai <benjamin@araisoft.com>,
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On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 11:11:59 -0700,
  Benjamin Arai <benjamin@araisoft.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for the reply. I have one more question.  Does it matter in which
> order that I make the index?

Please keep replies copied to the lists so that other people can learn from
and crontibute to the discussion.

In this case I am just going to copy back to the performance list, since it
is generally better for perfomance questions than the general list.

> For example, should I create an index cusip,date or date,cusip, does it
> matter which order.  My goal is to cluster the entries by cusip, then for
> each cusip order the data by date (maybe the order by data occurs
> automatically).  Hm, in that case maybe I only need to cluster by cusip, but
> then how do I ensure that each cusip had its data ordered by date?

I think that you want to order by cusip (assuming that corresponds to "name"
in you sample query below) first. You won't end up having to go through values
in the index that will be filtered out if you do it that way.

The documentation for the cluster command says that it clusters on indexes,
not columns. So if the index is on (cusip, date), then the records will be
ordered by cusip, date immediately after the cluster. (New records added 
after the cluster are not guarenteed to be ordered by the index.)

> 
> Benjamin
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruno Wolff III [mailto:bruno@wolff.to] 
> Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 8:32 AM
> To: Benjamin Arai
> Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org; pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: Question about clustering multiple columns
> 
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:04:15 -0700,
>   Benjamin Arai <benjamin@araisoft.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >  
> > I have a database where there are three columns (name,date,data).  The 
> > queries are almost always something like SELECT date,data FROM table 
> > WHERE name=blah AND date > 1/1/2005 AND date < 1/1/2006;.  I currently 
> > have three B-tree indexes, one for each of the columns.  Is clustering 
> > on date index going to be what I want, or do I need a index that 
> > contains both name and date?
> 
> I would expect that clustering on the name would be better for the above
> query.
> You probably want an index on name and date combined.
> 
> !DSPAM:4492ce0d180368658827628!
>