Gregory Maxwell wrote: > On 11/21/05, Jim C. Nasby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What about Greg Stark's idea of combining Simon's idea of storing > > per-heap-block xmin/xmax with using that information in an index scan? > > ISTM that's the best of everything that's been presented: it allows for > > faster index scans without adding a lot of visibility overhead to the > > index heap, and it also allows VACUUM to hit only pages that need > > vacuuming. Presumably this could also be used as the on-disk backing for > > the FSM, or it could potentially replace the FSM. > > This should be a big win all around, especially now since in memory > bitmaps make it more likely that some classes of queries will be pure > index. I still think it would be useful to have a estimated_count() > which switches to whatever method is needed to get a reasonably > accurate count quickly (stats when there are no wheres we can't > predict, sampling otherwise if the involved tables are large, and a > normal count in other cases.)
Added to TODO: * Add estimated_count(*) to return an estimate of COUNT(*) This would use the planner ANALYZE statistatics to return an estimated count. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly