Re: cost of CREATE VIEW ... AS SELECT DISTINCT

On Mar 29, 2005, at 5:07 AM, T E Schmitz wrote:

> Hello Scott,
>
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 15:43, T E Schmitz wrote:
>>> How expensive would it be to maintain the following VIEW:
>>>
>>> CREATE VIEW origin AS SELECT DISTINCT origin FROM transaktion
>>>
>>> if there is in index on transaktion.origin; the table transaktion 
>>> has thousands of records and there are only a few distinct origin?
>> The cost will only be encurred when running the view.  if you want
>> materialized views (which WOULD have maintenance costs) you'll have to
>
> Thank you for the pointer - that might come in handy for another 
> scenario.
>
>> The cost of executing that view should be the same as the cost of
>> running the query by hand.
>
> I did an EXPLAIN ANALYZE and a sequential scan was carried out despite 
> the index I had on the column. Maybe this is because I only have very 
> few records in my test DB.
>
> Would the "SELECT DISTINCT origin" always cause a sequential table 
> scan regardless whether there is an index on the origin column or not?
>

I think you are right.  If this is expensive and run often, you could 
always normalize further and create a table of "unique_origin" that 
would have only unique origins and set transaktion to have a foreign 
key referring to the unique_origin table and then just query the 
unique_origin table when you need to do the query above.

Sean