On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 12:39:04PM -0500, Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote: > This is probably stupid for some reason, but why not use a 64-bit > integer to track the number of records in the table? Increment when > adding records, decrement when deleting them... then COUNT(*) could > just return that in cases where a query is known to be looking at all > of the records?
Because there is no single value for count(*), if you're in a transaction that has added records it will be bigger than in a transaction that hasn't. How does your integer deal with this? The usual solutions this involve locking, which is precisely what MVCC is designed to avoid. Hope this helps, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a > tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone > else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.
pgpZChGBddTp8.pgp
Description: PGP signature
