RE: update ... from where id in (..) question

This FAQ Item 4.23:

4.23) Why are my subqueries using IN so slow?
Currently, we join subqueries to outer queries by sequentially
scanning the result of the subquery for each row of the outer query.
A workaround is to replace IN with EXISTS:
SELECT *
FROM tab
WHERE col1 IN (SELECT col2 FROM TAB2)

to:
SELECT *
FROM tab
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT col2 FROM TAB2 WHERE col1 = col2)

We hope to fix this limitation in a future release.

Mike Mascari
mascarm(at)mascari(dot)com

-----Original Message-----
From: Feite Brekeveld [SMTP:feite(dot)brekeveld(at)osiris-it(dot)nl]
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 4:31 AM
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [GENERAL] update ... from where id in (..) question

Hi,

I have a table with approx. 2mln records.

There were a few for which I had to update statusfield, so I did:

update table set statusflag = 'U' where id in ('id10',
'id20',
'id30');

this took so long that I cancelled it, and used separate

update table set statusflag = 'U' where id = 'id10';

statements, which were executed in a fraction of a second.

Has someone an explanation for this ?

--
Feite Brekeveld
feite(dot)brekeveld(at)osiris-it(dot)nl

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