Message-ID: <438681E0.6070006@kylecordes.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:15:44 -0600
From: Kyle Cordes <kyle@kylecordes.com>
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: 8.1 count(*) distinct: IndexScan/SeqScan
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	<17380.1132886273@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Tom Lane wrote:

>What "same result"?  You only ran it up to 2K rows, not 2M.  In any
>case, EXPLAIN without ANALYZE is pretty poor ammunition for complaining
>that the planner made the wrong choice.  I ran the same 
>

Hello, sorry to jump in mid-stream, but this reminded me of something.

I have hit cases where I have a query for which there is a somewhat 
"obvious" (to a human...) query plan that should make it possible to get 
a query answer pretty quickly.  Yet the query "never" finishes (or 
rather, after hours of waiting I finally kill it).  I assume this is 
because of a sub-optimal query plan.  But, it appears that an EXPLAIN 
ANALYZE runs the actual query, so it takes as long as the actual query.

In such a case, how can I go about tracking down the issue, up to an 
including a complaint about the query planner?   :-)

(Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the PG query planner; it often gets 
better results than another, popular commercial DBMS we use here.... 
that is just a general impression, not the result of setting up the same 
schema in each for a comparison.)

Kyle Cordes
www.kylecordes.com