You might want to reduce random_page_cost a little.
Keep in mind that your test case is small enough to fit in RAM and is probably not reflective of what will happen with larger tables.
I am also running 8.0 rc1 for Windows. Despite many hours spent tweaking various planner cost constants, I found little effect on cost estimates. Even reducing random_page_cost from 4.0 to 0.1 had negligible impact and failed to significantly influence the planner.
I'm not sure setting random_page_cost below 1.0 makes much sense.
Increasing the statistics target for the last_name column to 250 or so *may* help, at least if you're only selecting one name at a time.
Not going to do anything in this case. The planner is roughly right about how many rows will be returned, it's just not expecting everything to be in RAM.
That's the standard advice around here and the only thing I've found useful. Half the threads in this forum are about under-utilized indexes. It would be great if someone could admit the planner is broken and talk about actually fixing it!
Not sure I agree here - when the stats are accurate, you can get the planner to make near-optimal choices most of the time. Is there any particular pattern you've seen?
I'm unconvinced that the planner only favours sequential scans as table size decreases. In my experience so far, larger tables have the same problem only it's more noticeable.
Hmm - assuming your statistics are good, this would suggest the other cost settings just aren't right for your hardware.
The issue hits PostgreSQL harder than others because of its awful sequential scan speed, which is two to five times slower than other DBMS. The archives show there has been talk for years about this, but it seems, no solution. The obvious thing to consider is the block size, but people have tried increasing this in the past with only marginal success.
Must admit this puzzles me. Are you saying you can't saturate your disk I/O? Or are you saying other DBMS store records in 0.5 to 0.2 times less space than PG?
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