On 2010-05-31 22:09, Tom Lane wrote:
Jesper Krogh<jes...@krogh.cc>  writes:
Conceptually searching for the "full dataset" would always be fastest
solved by a seq-scan. The query planner enforces this so much, so not
even "enable_seqscan=off" can convince it to to something else.
...
Would it be possible to implement the "Filtering" using the gin-index and
a subsequent visibillity-check as on the index-scan?
You're failing to make any sense whatsoever.  If you're reading the full
dataset, there is no filter condition.  If there is a potentially
indexable filter condition, the planner will certainly consider that.
Yes, you're totally right on that (about making sense).

But that is because of the "simplified" use-case described. A more elaborate
description ..
I have a table with has a set of colums attached to it typically
used for "sorting" these columns may also be inferred on the table
by a typical join condition and a document that is fts-indexed.
So the actual use-case is that people query for:

"give me the 1000 most recent documents matching <term>"

Term may in some cases be hugely trivial, only filtering away 0.001% of the
dataset resulting in a "index-scan on a btree date index" filtering on the
tsvector column for <term>".

Term may also be something really specific only returning a single
or a few documents and just pushing a post-sorting to get the ordering.

But in the case where the query-planner falls over to a "index-scan"
on one of the btree-indices it ends up reading over from the TOAST data.

Will the planner consider doing the index-scan(forward or backwards)
on a btree-index and filter using a gin-index instead of filtering directly
on the tuple-data?
(I haven't been able to enforce an query-plan that looks like that).

Personally I think the issue here has got more to do with the
non-immutability of the single-argument form of to_tsquery, which means
it gets re-evaluated at every row during a seqscan.  Do your results
change if you work with to_tsquery('english', ...)  (or whatever your
default TS config is)?

It is english.. and yes it did indeed change the results. So the expensive case
dropped from ~60s to ~28s and the cheap case from ~7.3s to ~4.3s, that
is quite surprising that such "small" change can have that huge impact. The
single-argument version should be forbidden.

But the performance ratio between the two cases is still the same.

The test was actually run with the preliminary gincostestimate-patch from
Oleg Bartunov so the actual cost estimates match way better now, but that
should not impact the actual runtime.

Thanks

--
Jesper

--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to