Vivek --

If you could let people know what version of postgres, and which OS, it might 
help.

A guess: the planner sees that there are very few rows and decides that a 
sequential scan is faster (this is because a sequential scan on a table with 
only a few rows is probably done in one operation; retrieving index values and 
the actual data rows involves more trips to disk, potentially. You could test 
this by turning off seq scan as a user option and re-running the query.

I note that it is casting "vivek" as text and the underlying column varchar; in 
earlier versions of postgres this might cause a mismatch and confuse the 
planner; try casting as "WHERE username = 'vivek'::varchar" and see if that is 
an improvement.

HTH,

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

-----Original Message-----
From:   [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent:   Sat 12/2/2006 3:05 AM
To:     pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Cc:     
Subject:        [GENERAL] select query not using index

Dear Friends, 
I have a table as
 \d userpref;
                               Table "public.userpref"
   Column    |          Type          |                   Modifiers
-------------+------------------------+------------------------------------------------
 username    | character varying(101) | not null
 email       | character varying(255) | not null
 context     | character varying(32)  | not null default 'from_box'::character 
varying
 Indexes:
    "userpref_user_idx" btree (username)
Foreign-key constraints:
    "userpref_username_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (username, email) REFERENCES 
users(username, email)

The index was created before the table was populated. There are 3 rows in the 
table for 3 different users. Now when I do a 

EXPLAIN  SELECT * from userpref where username = 'vivek';
                        QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on userpref  (cost=0.00..1.26 rows=1 width=349)
   Filter: ((username)::text = 'vivek'::text)

EXPLAIN ANALYZE  SELECT * from userpref where username = 'vivek';
                                             QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on userpref  (cost=0.00..1.04 rows=1 width=70) (actual 
time=0.060..0.071 rows=1 loops=1)
   Filter: ((username)::text = 'vivek'::text)
 Total runtime: 0.216 ms
(3 rows)


It shows seq scan . It is not using the index perhaps. But I fail to understand 
why does it not use the index created? I have tried vacuuming the database, 
reindexing the table, running analyze command. 
Can anyone tell me what am I doing wrong?






With warm regards.

Vivek J. Joshi.

[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Trikon Electronics Pvt. Ltd.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
                -- Ernest Rutherford




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