Re: bigserial vs serial - which one I'd have to use?

On Sun, 2003-01-26 at 15:24, Medve Gabor wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Have you got any data (ie in percentage) of around how much more CPU
> work needed with the bigserial type in the queries?
>
> I have a log database with 100million records (the biggest table
> contains 65million records) and I use bigserial data type as primary key
> now. The primary key looks this way: YYYYMMDD1xxxxxxx where the first 8
> numbers are the date, and the x's are the record sequence number on that
> day. This way the records are in ascendant order. Almost all of the
> queries contains date constraints (PK like 'YYYYMMDD%'). I'd like to
> know if I do it in a stupid way or not. I'm not a DBA expert so every
> idea are welcome. If you need more information about the
> hardware/software environment, the DB structure then I'll post them.

I think you can only do LIKE queries on CHAR-type fields.

BETWEEN ought to help you, though:
SELECT *
FROM foo
where prim_key BETWEEN YYYYMMDD00000000 and YYYYMMDD999999999;

Alternatively, if you really want to do 'YYYYMMDD%', you could create
a functional index on to_char(prim_key).

Lastly, you could create 2 fields and create a compound PK:
PK_DATE DATE,
PK_SERIAL BIGINT

Then you could say:
SELECT *
FROM foo
where pk_date = 'YYYY-MM-DD'

Of course, then you'd be adding an extra 8 bytes to each column...

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