Re: Rules and Triggers

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Ludwig,
>
> >   I tried converting the rule to function & trigger
> > and it reported that it used an Index scan given the
> > same INSERT statement.
> >
> >    I was wondering why the rule used sequentail scan
> > and the equivalent function trigger used index scan.
>
> This is one of the documented differences between rules and triggers
> (at least, I've seen it in the documentation *somewhere*).  I can't
> tell you "why", though ... hopefully Tom or Bruce will speak to that.
   Neither  is  *that*  one of the differences between rules and   triggers, nor *should*  something  like  that  be
documented  instead of fixed.
 
   There  might  be  a  difference in the selectivity when using   OLD/NEW  Var  nodes  vs.  $n  parameters,  and
therefore  a   different  estimate  by  the  optimizer.  But in general rule   generated queries are using indexes.
 
   Of course, that requires  up  to  date  statistics.  Are  the   tables ANALYZE'd properly?

> For myself, I use triggers for most things, and rules just for
> updatable views.  Aside for index efficiency, rules are a Postgres-only
> thing, whereas several RDBMS's support triggers.   Gives me marginally
> better portability.
   As long as your queries only affect very few rows, you'll not   notice much of  a  performance  difference.  Try
updating a   couple  thousand  rows with one UPDATE. A trigger will fire a   couple thousand times, where a rule does
allthe work in  one   additional query.
 


Jan

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