Re: Delete operation VERY slow...

Wow! That was almost instantaneous. I can't believe the difference.

The only inconvenience is that I need to remove all the foreign key
constraints before truncating, then put them back after. But I suppose
it is a small price to pay for this incredible optimization.

Thank you!

On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 12:52 +0530, Gourish Singbal wrote:
>
> David,
>
> Truncate table would be a good idea if u want to delete all the data
> in the table.
> You need not perform vacuum in this case since there are no dead rows
> created.
>
> ~gourish
>
>
> On 6/16/06, David Leangen <postgres(at)leangen(dot)net> wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> I am trying to delete an entire table. There are about 41,000
> rows in
> the table (based on count(*)).
>
> I am using the SQL comment: delete from table;
>
> The operation seems to take in the order of hours, rather than
> seconds
> or minutes.
>
> "Explain delete from table" gives me:
>
> QUERY PLAN
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Seq Scan on table (cost=0.00..3967.74 rows=115374 width=6)
> (1 row)
>
>
> I am using an Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz CPU. My system has about
> 1.2GB of
> RAM. This should be ok... my database isn't that big, I think.
>
>
> Any ideas why this takes so long and how I could speed this
> up?
>
> Or alternatively, is there a better way to delete all the
> contents from
> a table?
>
>
> Thank you!
>
>
>
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>
>
>
> --
> Best,
> Gourish Singbal