Tom, > BTW, as for your original question about performance, the current > external sort algorithm is mainly designed to conserve disk space, > not to be as fast as possible. ÂIt could probably be a good bit faster > if we didn't mind taking twice as much space (mainly because the > physical disk access pattern would be a lot less random). ÂBut I know > we will get push-back if we try to revert to doing that.
We could do it as a compile-time option or a GUC. I know I wouldn't mind taking extra disk space if my sorts ran faster on very large tables. Currently, building a new btree index on a 100GB table takes about 2 hours on a v40z. And that's not becuase of I/O; disk bandwidth is less than 20% used. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])