"Jonah H. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Looking at the message boards, there is significant interest in the COUNT(*) > aspect. However, rather than solely address the COUNT(*) TODO item, why not > fix > it and add additional functionality found in commercial databases as well? I > believe Oracle has had this feature since 7.3 and I know people take advantage > of it.
I think part of the problem is that there's a bunch of features related to these types of queries and the lines between them blur. You seem to be talking about putting visibility information inside indexes for so index-only plans can be performed. But you're also talking about queries like "select count(*) from foo" with no where clauses. Such a query wouldn't be helped by index-only scans. Perhaps you're thinking about caching the total number of records in a global piece of state like a materialized view? That would be a nice feature but I think it should done as a general materialized view implementation, not a special case solution for just this one query. Perhaps you're thinking of the min/max problem of being able to use indexes to pick out just the tuples satisfying the min/max constraint. That seems to me to be one of the more tractable problems in this area but it would still require lots of work. I suggest you post a specific query you find is slow. Then discuss how you think it ought to be executed and why. -- greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org