On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 12:15:47 -0700, Dror Matalon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have a somewhat large table, 3 million rows, 1 Gig on disk, and growing. Doing a > count(*) takes around 40 seconds. > > Looks like the count(*) fetches the table from disk and goes through it. > Made me wonder, why the optimizer doesn't just choose the smallest index > which in my case is around 60 Megs and goes through it, which it could > do in a fraction of the time.
Because it can't tell from the index if a tuple is visible to the current transaction and would still have to hit the table to check this. So that performance would be a lot worse instead of better. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html