Ken Hill wrote:
Is there a performance trade-off between column indexes and record
inserts?

I know that in MS Access there is such a trade-off. This being indexes
make SQL queries perform faster at the cost of record insert speed. Put
another way, the more column indexes in a table, the slower a record
insert in that table performs.

Is there a similar trade-off in PostgreSQL?

The tradeoff is made in every system. The more indexes you have on a table, the more indexes need to be updated when you update/insert/delete rows.

So - a unique constraint automatically implies an index in PostgreSQL (it's how it implements its unique checks). Other than that, you should only index those columns where you will want a small number of rows or quick ordering.

--
  Richard Huxton
  Archonet Ltd

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