Re: slow joining very large table to smaller ones

On Jul 14, 2005, at 7:15 PM, John A Meinel wrote:
>
>
> Is the distribution of your rows uneven? Meaning do you have more rows
> with a later id than an earlier one?
>

There are definitely some id's that will have many times more than
the others. If I group and count them, the top 10 are fairly
dominant in the table.
>>
>
> Hmm.. How to do it permanantly? Well you could always issue "set
> join_collapse set 1; select * from ...."
> But obviously that isn't what you prefer. :)
>
> I think there are things you can do to make merge join more expensive
> than a nested loop, but I'm not sure what they are.

Maybe someone else has some ideas to encourage this behavior for
future work? Setting it on a per-connection basis is doable, but
would add some burden to us in code.

>
> What I really don't understand is that the estimates dropped as well.
> The actual number of estimate rows drops to 3k instead of > 1M.
> The real question is why does the planner think it will be so
> expensive?
>
>
>> select count(*) from k_b join k_r using (incidentid) where k_b.id=107
>> and k_r.id=94;
>> count
>> -------
>> 373
>>
>>
>
> Well, this says that they are indeed much more selective.
> Each one has > 1k rows, but together you end up with only 400.
>

Is this a bad thing? Is this not "selective enough" to make it much
faster?

Overall, I'm much happier now after seeing the new plan come about,
if I can find a way to make that join_collapse behavior permanent, I
can certainly live with these numbers.

Thanks again for your continued efforts.

-Dan