--- Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > =?iso-8859-1?q?Gary=20Cowell?= > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > So it seems the idea that oracle is dropping > duplicate > > rows prior to the sort when using distinct may > indeed > > be the case. > > Okay. We won't have any short-term solution for > making DISTINCT do that, > but if you are on PG 7.4 you could get the same > effect from using > GROUP BY: instead of > select distinct version from vers where version is > not null > try > select version from vers where version is not null > group by version > You should get a HashAggregate plan out of that, and > I'd think it'd be > pretty quick when there are not many distinct values > of version. >
Yeah out of the half million rows there are only ever going to be 500 or so distinct values. I do indeed get such a plan. It's much faster that way. Down to 16 seconds. I'll get the chap to rewrite his app to use group by instead of distinct. Thanks (everyone) for the top class help! ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - sooooo many all-new ways to express yourself http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org