Re: **SPAM** Faster count(*)?

From: dracula007(at)atlas(dot)cz
To: pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: **SPAM** Faster count(*)?
Date: 2005-08-09 23:29:58
Message-ID: 196456155.20050810012958@karneval.cz
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I believe running count(*) means fulltable scan, and there's no way
to do it without it. But what about some "intermediate" table, with
the necessary counts?

That means to create a table with values (counts) you need, and on
every insert/delete/update increment or decrement the appropriate
values. This way you won't need the count(*) query anymore, and the
performance should be much better.

t.v.

> 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?

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