On Mon, 30 Mar 2009, Віталій Тимчишин wrote:
What is the bad plan? Is it like the first plan from your first message?

It's the plan a few messages back. The UNION ALL query I showed effectively got the database to do it both ways round.

It's the case that a "between" index scan will return much fewer rows than an open-ended index scan.

BTW: About aggregates: they can return arrays, but I can't imagine what you can 
group by on... May be windowing functions from 8.4
could help.

A normal function seems the best way to go about this - they can return multiple rows.

So, I have written a plpgsql function to calculate overlaps. It works reasonably quickly where there aren't that many overlaps. However, it seems to go very slowly when there are a large number of rows to return. I am considering recoding it as a C function instead.

1. The docs say that returning multiple rows from plpgsql waits until the
    whole lot are done before returning any. Does this happen with the C
    functions too?
2. What sort of speedup would I be likely to see?
3. How do I RAISE NOTICE in a C function?

Also, if your maximum length (select max(end-start) from location) is low 
enough, you can try adding some more constraints to make
optimizer happy (have it more precise row count to select correct plan).

Alas:

select min(start), max(start), min(end), max(end), max(end - start) from 
location;

 min |   max    | min |   max    |   max
-----+----------+-----+----------+----------
   1 | 61544858 |   1 | 61545105 | 21512431
(1 row)

Matthew

--
I suppose some of you have done a Continuous Maths course. Yes? Continuous
Maths? <menacing stares from audience> Whoah, it was like that, was it!
                                       -- Computer Science Lecturer
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