Re: Building multiple indexes concurrently

On Mar 16, 2010, at 6:04 PM, Rob Wultsch wrote:

> Lets say I have a large table bigTable to which I would like to add
> two btree indexes. Is there a more efficient way to create indexes
> than:
> CREATE INDEX idx_foo on bigTable (foo);
> CREATE INDEX idx_baz on bigTable (baz);
> Or
> CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY idx_foo on bigTable (foo);
> CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY idx_baz on bigTable (baz);
>
> Are there any particular performance optimizations that would be in
> play in such a scenario?
>
> At a minimum I assume that if both of the commands were started at
> about the same time they would each scan the table in the same
> direction and whichever creation was slower would benefit from most of
> the table data it needed being prepopulated in shared buffers. Is this
> the case?

That sounds reasonable to me. You might also look at upping your maintenance_work_mem for your session, as well.