Re: Is Optimizer smart enough?

tmorelli(at)tmorelli(dot)com(dot)br writes:
> Just for curiosity: suppose there is an excellent index frequently picked by
> the optimizer. Suppose now that this index became extremelly fragmented with
> thousands of updates. Without a REINDEX, will Optimizer still pick it? Or the
> optimizer is smart enough to detect index fragmentation and discard it?

IIRC, btcostestimate is sensitive to the physical size of the index,
so it would catch the first-order effect of index bloat. It wouldn't
notice index fragmentation in the sense of increasingly random location
of logically-sequential leaf pages. But I'm not sure how much that
matters for typical situations. If you have a huge fraction of dead
tuples, I'd say that index fragmentation is not your worst problem...

regards, tom lane