Re: Wrong index choosen?

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Gaetano Mendola wrote:

> empdb=# explain analyze select * from v_past_connections where login_time > '2004-07-21';
> QUERY PLAN
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Index Scan using idx_user_logs_login_time on user_logs (cost=0.00..12.90 rows=481 width=28) (actual time=7.338..661.300 rows=22477 loops=1)
> Index Cond: (login_time > '2004-07-21 00:00:00+02'::timestamp with time zone)
> Total runtime: 676.472 ms
> (3 rows)

In this plan it estimates to get 481 but it got 22477. So the estimation
was very wrong. You can increase the statistics tarhet on the login_time
and it will probably be better (after the next analyze).

> why then the planner choose to do an index scan using the filter that
> retrieve a bigger ammount of rows ? A bug ?

Because it has to decide on the plan before it knows exactly what the
result will be. As seen above, the estimation was wrong and thus the plan
was not as good as it could have been.

In this case you probably also want to create a combined index on both
columns:

CREATE INDEX foo ON user_log (id_user, login_time);

ps. This letter belonged to pgsql-performance and not pgsql-hackers.

--
/Dennis Björklund