Re: Why does the query planner use two full indexes, when a dedicated partial index exists?

Dear Jeff,

Thanks for your help,

> * The reindex solution doesn't work. I just tried it, and
> the query planner
> is still using the wrong indexes.
>
>
> It switched to a better one of the wrong indices, though, and got
> several times faster.
>

I think that this is a red herring. The switching between the two
"wrong" indices seems to be caused by non-uniformity in the
parcel_id_code: although it's distributed fairly well across 1-99999,
it's not perfect.

As for the speed-up, I think that's mostly caused by the fact that
running "Analyse" is pulling the entire table (and the relevant index)
into RAM and flushing other things out of that cache.

> How did it get so bloated in the first place? Is the table being
> updated so rapidly that the statistics might be wrong even immediately
> after analyze finishes?

I don't think it is. We're doing about 10 inserts and 20 updates per
second on that table. But when I tested it, production had stopped for
the night - so the system was quiescent between the analyse and the select.

> In any case, I can't get it to prefer the full index in 9.1.6 at all.
> The partial index wins hands down unless the table is physically
> clustered by the parcel_id_code column. In which that case, the partial
> index wins by only a little bit.

Interesting that you should say that... the original setup script did
choose to cluster the table on that column.

Also, I wonder whether it matters which order the indexes are created in?

Best wishes,

Richard