Re: PostgreSQL does not choose my indexes well

Greetings,

* David G. Johnston (david.g.johnston@gmail.com) wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 8:29 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> > > On Thursday, April 23, 2020, Thomas Kellerer <shammat@gmx.net> wrote:
> > >> Plus: scanning idx_tabla_entidad is more efficient because that index is
> > >> smaller.
> >
> > > Really?  The absence of 33 million rows in the partial index seems like
> > it
> > > would compensate fully and then some for the extra included columns.
> >
> > On the other hand, an indexscan is likely to end up being effectively
> > random-access rather than the purely sequential access involved in
> > a seqscan.
>
> I feel like I'm missing something as the OP's query is choosing indexscan -
> just it is choosing to scan the full index containing the searched upon
> field instead of a partial index that doesn't contain the field but whose
> predicate matches the where condition - in furtherance of a count(*)
> computation where the columns don't really matter.

The actual query isn't a count(*) though, it's a 'select *'.

> I do get "its going to perform 1.4 million random index entries and heap
> lookup anyway - so it doesn't really matter" - but the first answer was
> "the full index is smaller than the partial" which goes against my
> intuition.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the full index is quite a bit bigger than the
partial index- see my note from just a moment ago.

> The sequential scan that isn't being used would have to touch 25x the
> number of records - so its non-preference seems reasonable.

Agreed on that.

Thanks,

Stephen