"Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net> writes: > That does sounds simpler. Is chunk-at-a-time a realistic option for 8.3?
It seems fairly trivial to me to have a scheme where you do one fill-workmem-and-scan-indexes cycle per invocation, and store the next-heap-page-to-scan in some handy place (new pg_class column updated along with relpages/reltuples, likely). Galy is off in left field with some far more complex ideas :-( but I don't see that there's all that much needed to support this behavior ... especially if we don't expose it to the SQL level but only support it for autovac's use. Then we're not making any big commitment to support the behavior forever. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match