Re: Optimising queries involving unions

Hi,

I'm using a workaround for this kind of issues:

consider:

select A from

(select B from T1 where C
union
select B from T2 where C
union
select B from T3 where C
) foo
where D


in your case:

SELECT u.txt
FROM (
SELECT id, txt FROM largetable1,smalltable t WHERE t.id = u.id AND
t.foo = 'bar'
UNION ALL
SELECT id, txt FROM largetable2,smalltable t WHERE t.id = u.id AND
t.foo = 'bar'
) u

and

select A from foo where C and D

(A, B, C, D being everything you want, C and D may also include "GROUP
BY,ORDER...)

The first version will be handled correctly by the optimiser, whereas in the
second version,
Postgres will first build the UNION and then run the query on it.

I'm having large tables with identical structure, one per day.
Instead of defining a view on all tables,
I' using functions that "distribute" my query on all tables.

The only issue if that I need to define a type that match the result
structure and each return type needs its own function.

Example:
(The first parameter is a schema name, the four next corresponds to A, B, C,
D

---------------------
create type T_i2_vc1 as (int_1 int,int_2 int,vc_1 varchar);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION
vq_T_i2_vc1(varchar,varchar,varchar,varchar,varchar) RETURNS setof T_i2_vc1
AS $$

DECLARE
result T_i2_vc1%rowtype;
mviews RECORD;
sql varchar;
counter int;
BEGIN
select into counter 1;

-- loop on all daily tables
FOR mviews IN SELECT distinct this_day FROM daylist order by plainday
desc LOOP

IF counter =1 THEN
select INTO sql 'SELECT '||mviews.this_day||' AS plainday, '||$2||'
FROM '||$3||'_'||mviews.plainday||' WHERE '||$4;
ELSE
select INTO sql sql||' UNION ALL SELECT '||mviews.this_day||' AS
plainday, '||$2||' FROM '||$3||'_'||mviews.plainday||' WHERE '||$4;
END IF;

select into counter counter+1;
END LOOP;

select INTO sql 'SELECT '||$1||' FROM ('||sql||')foo '||$5;

for result in EXECUTE (sql) LOOP
return NEXT result;
end loop;
return ;

END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Note: in your case the function shoud have a further parameter to join
largetable(n) to smalltable in the "sub queries"

HTH,

Marc

> I've got a query that I think the query optimiser should be able
> to work it's magic on but it doesn't! I've had a look around and
> asked on the IRC channel and found that the current code doesn't
> attempt to optimise for what I'm asking it to do at the moment.
> Here's a bad example:
>
> SELECT u.txt
> FROM smalltable t, (
> SELECT id, txt FROM largetable1
> UNION ALL
> SELECT id, txt FROM largetable2) u
> WHERE t.id = u.id
> AND t.foo = 'bar';
>
> I was hoping that "smalltable" would get moved up into the union,
> but it doesn't at the moment and the database does a LOT of extra
> work. In this case, I can manually do quite a couple of transforms
> to move things around and it does the right thing:
>
> SELECT txt
> FROM (
> SELECT l.id as lid, r.id as rid, r.foo, l.txt
> FROM largetable1 l, smalltable r
> UNION ALL
> SELECT l.id as lid, r.id as rid, r.foo, l.txt
> FROM largetable1 l, smalltable r)
> WHERE foo = 'bar';
> AND lid = rid
>
> The optimiser is intelligent enough to move the where clauses up
> into the union and end end up with a reasonably optimal query.
> Unfortunatly, in real life, the query is much larger and reorganising
> everything manually isn't really feasible!

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