Large select, best practice question

From: Bendik Rognlien Johansen <bendik(dot)johansen(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-novice(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Large select, best practice question
Date: 2006-03-01 16:16:25
Message-ID: C68E09E0-8B9E-424D-A904-1D2C42C6C18D@gmail.com
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Hello,
I have three tables (very simplified):
- people (~6 million records)
- addresses (~7 million records)
- contacts (~10 million records)

I need to select all records from the people table and join addresses
and contacts on it. I use the result to build a Lucene index. One
document for each person (including all contacts and addresses). I am
using jdbc.

When doing it this way, i end up with many more rows than people, and
my application logic takes care of putting the correct address/
contact with each person. To do this the records have to be sorted.
(Takes a loong time) This causes a lot of very similar result rows.
Example:

John Smith has 2 phone numbers and 2 addresses

John Smith | 555-67567 | Elm street 32
John Smith | 555-83463 | Elm street 32
John Smith | 555-83463 | P.O box 55
John Smith | 555-67567 | P.O box 55

This method is quite slow and error prone.

Is there a more elegant solution to this problem?

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