Received: from localhost (maia-3.hub.org [200.46.204.184]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 266209FA2EF for ; Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:11:11 -0300 (ADT) Received: from postgresql.org ([200.46.204.71]) by localhost (mx1.hub.org [200.46.204.184]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 47882-05 for ; Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:10:48 -0300 (ADT) X-Greylist: from auto-whitelisted by SQLgrey-1.7.4 Received: from smtp.janestcapital.com (www.janestcapital.com [66.155.124.107]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C62B19FB426 for ; Thu, 22 Mar 2007 13:10:53 -0300 (ADT) Received: from [172.25.129.161] [38.96.172.125] by janestcapital.com with ESMTP (SMTPD-9.10) id AA8B01D8; Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:10:51 -0400 Message-ID: <4602AA8B.3070505@janestcapital.com> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:10:51 -0400 From: Brian Hurt User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Craig A. James" CC: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org Subject: Re: Performance of count(*) References: <200703221208.19358.albert@sedifa.com> <20070322141807.GE11402@mathom.us> <46029DE3.9030505@modgraph-usa.com> In-Reply-To: <46029DE3.9030505@modgraph-usa.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: Maia Mailguard 1.0.1 X-Archive-Number: 200703/336 X-Sequence-Number: 23741 Craig A. James wrote: > > One of our biggest single problems is this very thing. It's not a > Postgres problem specifically, but more embedded in the idea of a > relational database: There are no "job status" or "rough estimate of > results" or "give me part of the answer" features that are critical to > many real applications. > For the "give me part of the answer", I'm wondering if cursors wouldn't work (and if not, why not)? Brian