Re: rtree/gist index taking enormous amount of space in 8.2.3

Dolafi, Tom wrote:
> min(fmin) | max(fmin) | avg(fmin)
> 1 | 55296469 | 11423945
>
> min(fmax) | max(fmax) | avg(fmax)
> 18 | 55553288 | 11424491
>
> There are 5,704,211 rows in the table.

When you're looking for weird index problems, it's more interesting to know if there are certain numbers that occur a LOT. From your statistics above, each number occurs about 10 times in the table. But do some particular numbers occur thousands, or even millions, of times?

Here is a query that will print a list of the highest-occuring values. You might expect a few occurances of 20, and maybe 30, but if you have thousands or millions of occurances of certain numbers, then that can screw up an index.

select fmax, c from
(select fmax, count(fmax) as c from your_table group by fmax) as foo
where c > 3 order by c desc;

Craig