On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Greg Stark <st...@mit.edu> wrote: > On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >> There would be some merit in your suggestion if we knew that all/most >> toasted columns would actually get fetched out of the catcache entry >> at some point. Then we'd only be moving the cost around, and might even >> save something on repeated accesses. But I don't think we know that. >> In the specific example at hand (pg_statistic entries) it's entirely >> plausible that the planner would only need the histogram, or only need >> the MCV list, depending on the sorts of queries it was coping with. > > Fwiw detoasting statistics entries sounds like a fine idea to me. I've > often seen queries that are unexpectedly slow to plan and chalked it > up to statistics entries getting toasted. If it's ok to read either > the histogram or MVC list from disk every time we plan a query then > why are we bothering with an in-memory cache of the statistics at all? > > The only thing that gives me pause is that it's possible these entries > are *really* large. If you have a decent number of tables that are all > a few megabytes of histograms then things could go poorly. But I don't > think having to read in these entries from pg_toast every time you > plan a query is going to go much better for you either.
Yep; in fact, I've previously submitted test results showing that repeatedly decompressing TOAST entries can significantly slow down query planning. That having been said, Tom's fix seems safer to back-patch. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers