Re: Tsearch2 Initial Search Speed

Matthew Wakeling wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jun 2008, Howard Cole wrote:
>> They both appear to do a scan on the email table (Why?).
>
> The indexes don't contain copies of the row data. They only contain
> pointers to the rows in the table. So once the index has been
> consulted, Postgres still needs to look at the table to fetch the
> actual rows. Of course, it only needs to bother looking where the
> index points, and that is the benefit of an index.
>
> Matthew
>
Thanks for your patience with me here Matthew, But what I don't
understand is why it needs to do a scan on email. If I do a query that
uses another index, then it uses the index only and does not scan the
email table. The scan on the fts index takes 6 seconds, which presumably
returns email_id's (the email_id being the primary key) - what does it
then need from the email table that takes 22 seconds?

e.g.

triohq=> explain select email_id from email where email_directory_id=1;
                                         QUERY PLAN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------
 Index Scan using email_email_directory_id_idx on email
(cost=0.00..129.01 rows
=35 width=8)
   Index Cond: (email_directory_id = 1)
(2 rows)