On Informix however it is blindingly fast, and can also be instantly conjured 
with the dbaccess tool (Info/Table/Status). They might be stashing this count 
somewhere, but it is not available when the table is locked, as during a load. 
However they do it, performance does not seem to suffer, and having this 
rapidly available is certainly nice. Especially when people are used to it.

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

-----Original Message-----
From:   [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Jeffrey Melloy
Sent:   Thu 10/6/2005 3:47 PM
To:     Neil Conway
Cc:     Aly S.P Dharshi; pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject:        Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL Gotchas
Neil Conway wrote:

>
>"COUNT(*) very slow": this is a known issue -- see the -hackers archives
>for many prior discussions. MVCC makes this hard to solve effectively
>(whether applications should actually be using COUNT(*) on large tables
>with no WHERE clause is another matter...)
>
>-Neil
>  
>
And it's not like a count(*) on an Oracle database of any decently-sized 
dataset is blazing fast, or even in blazing's ballpark.

The only thing I could see actually being an issue is the random() one 
and add missing from.  The rest are trivial.  The random() thing is 
interesting, esoteric, and probably has never been a problem in a real 
situation.  (Or has exactly once, when he wrote that gotcha)

Jeff

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