Hi all,

I have a table with around 3M records in it and a few indexes on it. One of them is on 
the day column. I get 10-20K new records a day. After running ANALYSE in psql I tried 
the following queries:

buns=# explain select count(*) from cdr where day >= '20040127';
                            QUERY PLAN                            
------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=85596.50..85596.50 rows=1 width=0)
   ->  Seq Scan on cdr  (cost=0.00..85053.86 rows=217055 width=0)
         Filter: ("day" >= '2004-01-27'::date)
(3 rows)

buns=# explain select count(*) from cdr where day = '20040127'; 
                                   QUERY PLAN                                   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=12950.10..12950.10 rows=1 width=0)
   ->  Index Scan using cdr_ix1 on cdr  (cost=0.00..12928.00 rows=8839 width=0)
         Index Cond: ("day" = '2004-01-27'::date)
(3 rows)

buns=# explain select count(*) from cdr where day between '20040127' and current_date;
                                       QUERY PLAN                                      
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=20129.91..20129.91 rows=1 width=0)
   ->  Index Scan using cdr_ix1 on cdr  (cost=0.00..20095.66 rows=13699 width=0)
         Index Cond: (("day" >= '2004-01-27'::date) AND ("day" <= ('now'::text)::date))
(3 rows)

I understand that selecting count(*) will involve a scan at some stage, but I was 
surprised that the index wasn't used in the >= case, but was used in the between case.

Why is this so? Do I need to ANALYSE some more or is this just the way the query 
planner works?

Thanks,
David

David Witham
Telephony Platforms Architect
Unidial
Ph: 03 8628 3383
Fax: 03 8628 3399


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