Salve.
I understand from various web searches and so on that PostgreSQL's MVCC
mechanism makes it very hard to use indices or table metadata to optimise
count(*). Is there a better way to guess the "approximate size" of a table?
I'm trying to write a trigger that fires on insert and performs some
maintenance (collapsing overlapping boxes into a single large box,
specifically) as the table grows. My initial attempt involved count(*) and,
as the number of pages in the table grew, that trigger bogged down the
database.
Any thoughts?
-O