Re: Querying distinct values from a large table

Igor Lobanov wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I have rather large table with about 5 millions of rows and a dozen of
> columns. Let's suppose that columns are named 'a', 'b', 'c' etc. I need
> to query distinct pairs of ('a';'b') from this table.

> Creating compound index on this table using following statement:
>
> CREATE INDEX tbl_a_b_idx ON tbl( a, b );
>
> gives no effect, postgres simply ignores it, at least according to the
> EXPLAIN output.

What version of PostgreSQL is it?

How many distinct values are you getting back from your 5 million rows?
If there are too many, an index isn't going to help.

Can you share the EXPLAIN ANALYSE output? You might want to try
increasing work_mem for this one query to speed any sorting.

How often is the table updated? Clustering might buy you some
improvements (but not a huge amount I suspect).

Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd