On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 23:13 +0000, Heikki Linnakangas wrote: > It's a good point that we don't want pg_dump to screw up the cluster > order, but that's the only use case I've seen this far for disabling > sync scans. Even that wouldn't matter much if our estimate for > "clusteredness" didn't get screwed up by a table that looks like this: > "5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4"
It doesn't seem like there is any reason for the estimate to get confused, but it apparently does. I loaded a test table with a similar distribution to your example, and it shows a correlation of about -0.5, but it should be as good as something near -1 or +1. I am not a statistics expert, but it seems like a better measurement would be: "what is the chance that, if the tuples are close together in index order, the corresponding heap tuples are close together?". The answer to that question in your example is "very likely", so there would be no problem. Is there a reason we don't do this? Regards, Jeff Davis ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq