Re: Slow SQL lookup due to every field being listed in SORT KEY

Mason Harding <mason.harding@gmail.com> writes:
> Hi all.  I Have the following query (tested in postgres 8.4 and 9.0rc1)

> SELECT distinct event0_.*
> FROM event event0_ inner join account account1_ on
> event0_.account_id_owner=account1_.account_id
> LEFT OUTER JOIN friend friendcoll2_ ON
> account1_.account_id=friendcoll2_.friend_account_id
> WHERE (event0_.account_id_owner=2 or friendcoll2_.account_id=2
>     AND friendcoll2_.status=2 AND (event0_.is_recomended is null OR
> event0_.is_recomended=false))
> ORDER BY event0_.event_id DESC LIMIT 25

> None of the tables listed here have more than a couple of thousand rows, and
> are all indexed.  If I run that query as is, it will take up to 5 seconds,
> if I remove the ORDER BY and LIMIT, it will run into about 200 ms.

The reason it's sorting by all the columns is the DISTINCT: that's
implemented by a sort-and-unique type of scheme so it has to be sure
that all the columns are sorted.  You didn't show the non-ORDER-BY
plan, but I suspect it's preferring a hash aggregation approach to
doing the DISTINCT if it doesn't have to produce sorted output.

The easiest way to make that query faster would be to raise work_mem
enough so that the sort doesn't have to spill to disk.

            regards, tom lane