I'm trying to debug a query that gets all the French translations for all US string values. Ultimately, my goal is to rank them all by edit distance, and only pick the top N.

However, I cannot get the basic many-to-many join to return all the results in less than 3 seconds, which seems slow to me. (My competition is an in-memory perl hash that runs on client machines providing results in around 3 seconds, after a 30 second startup time.)

The simplified schema is :
        source ->> translation_pair <<- translation

The keys are all sequence generated oids. I do wonder if the performance would be better if I used the string values as keys to get better data distribution. Would this help speed up performance?

There are 159283 rows in source
There are 1723935 rows in translation, of which 159686 are French

=# explain SELECT s.source_id, s.value AS sourceValue, t.value AS translationValue
      FROM
          source s,
          translation_pair tp,
          translation t,
          language l
      WHERE
          s.source_id = tp.source_id
          AND tp.translation_id = t.translation_id
          AND t.language_id = l.language_id
          AND l.name = 'French' ;

                                                         QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------------
Merge Join  (cost=524224.49..732216.29 rows=92447 width=97)
   Merge Cond: (tp.source_id = s.source_id)
   ->  Sort  (cost=524224.49..524455.60 rows=92447 width=55)
         Sort Key: tp.source_id
         ->  Nested Loop  (cost=1794.69..516599.30 rows=92447 width=55)
-> Nested Loop (cost=1794.69..27087.87 rows=86197 width=55) -> Index Scan using language_name_key on "language" l (cost=0.00..8.27 rows=1 width=4)
                           Index Cond: ((name)::text = 'French'::text)
-> Bitmap Heap Scan on translation t (cost=1794.69..25882.43 rows=95774 width=59) Recheck Cond: (t.language_id = l.language_id) -> Bitmap Index Scan on translation_language_l_key (cost=0.00..1770.74 rows=95774 width=0) Index Cond: (t.language_id = l.language_id) -> Index Scan using translation_pair_translation_id on translation_pair tp (cost=0.00..5.67 rows=1 width=8)
                     Index Cond: (tp.translation_id = t.translation_id)
-> Index Scan using source_pkey on source s (cost=0.00..206227.65 rows=159283 width=46)
(15 rows)

I'm running Postgres 8.2.3 on latest Mac OSX 10.4.x. The CPU is a 3Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, w/ 5G ram. The drive is very fast although I don't know the configuration (I think its an XRaid w/ 3 SAS/SCSI 70G Seagate drives).

The regular performance configurable values are:
work_mem           32MB
shared_buffers     32MB
max_fsm_pages      204800
max_fsm_relations  1000


Thanks for any advice,

Drew

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend

Reply via email to