Message-ID: <45BF0C13.3070003@archonet.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:12:51 +0000
From: Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com>
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To: Igor Lobanov <ilobanov@swsoft.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Querying distinct values from a large table
References: <45BF02DE.7080605@swsoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <45BF02DE.7080605@swsoft.com>
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Igor Lobanov wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I have rather large table with about 5 millions of rows and a dozen of 
> columns. Let's suppose that columns are named 'a', 'b', 'c' etc. I need 
> to query distinct pairs of ('a';'b') from this table.

> Creating compound index on this table using following statement:
> 
> CREATE INDEX tbl_a_b_idx ON tbl( a, b );
> 
> gives no effect, postgres simply ignores it, at least according to the 
> EXPLAIN output.

What version of PostgreSQL is it?

How many distinct values are you getting back from your 5 million rows? 
If there are too many, an index isn't going to help.

Can you share the EXPLAIN ANALYSE output? You might want to try 
increasing work_mem for this one query to speed any sorting.

How often is the table updated? Clustering might buy you some 
improvements (but not a huge amount I suspect).


   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd