Re: Statistical Analysis

"Timothy H. Keitt" <keitt(at)nceas(dot)ucsb(dot)edu> writes:
> Oops. Just tried that; the random() call only get evaluated once.

Sigh, forgot to mention the solution. There's an undocumented function:

* bool oidrand (oid o, int4 X)-
* takes in an oid and a int4 X, and will return 'true'
* about 1/X of the time.

typically used like this:

-- select roughly 1/10 of the tuples
SELECT * FROM onek WHERE oidrand(onek.oid, 10);

This doesn't get collapsed by the overly aggressive constant-qual
recognizer because it takes a table column as input. (The function
doesn't actually *use* the OID, mind you, but the planner doesn't
know that. What a kluge... but it gets the job done.)

Note that this isn't necessarily going to fix your performance problem,
since a scan of the whole input table is still going to be required.
But if the expensive processing was somewhere downstream of that basic
scan, it should help.

regards, tom lane