Re: Triggers During COPY

Thomas F.O'Connell wrote:
>
> The problem comes in importing new data into the tables for which the
> counts are maintained. The current import process does some
> preprocessing and then does a COPY from the filesystem to one of the
> tables on which counts are maintained. This means that for each row
> being inserted by COPY, a trigger is fired. This didn't seem like a big
> deal to me until testing began on realistic data sets.
>
> For a 5,000-record import, preprocessing plus the COPY took about 5
> minutes. Once the triggers used for maintaining the counts were added,
> this grew to 25 minutes. While I knew there would be a slowdown per row
> affected, I expected something closer to 2x than to 5x.
> rformance out of this scenario?
>
Have been seeing similar behavior whilst testing sample code for the 8.0
docs (summary table plpgsql trigger example).

I think the nub of the problem is dead tuples bloat in the summary /
count table, so each additional triggered update becomes more and more
expensive as time goes on. I suspect the performance decrease is
exponential with the no of rows to be processed.

> Would it be absurd to drop the triggers during import and recreate them
> afterward and update the counts in a summary update based on information
> from the import process?
>
>
That's the conclusion I came to :-)

regards

Mark