Re: EXPLAIN (no ANALYZE) taking an hour for INSERT FROM SELECT

On 3/11/15 11:15 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Gunnlaugur Thor Briem <gunnlaugur@gmail.com> writes:
>> Yes, I think that's it: I've just realized that immediately prior to the
>> INSERT, in the same transaction, an unfiltered DELETE has been issued; i.e.
>> the whole table is being rewritten. Then the INSERT is issued ... with a
>> WHERE clause on non-existence in the (now empty) table.
>
>> In that case of course the WHERE clause is unnecessary, as it will always
>> evaluate as true (and we've locked the whole table for writes). Looks like
>> it is a lot worse than unnecessary, though, if it triggers this performance
>> snafu in EXPLAIN INSERT.
>
> Ah-hah.  So what's happening is that the planner is doing an indexscan
> over the entire table of now-dead rows, looking vainly for an undeleted
> maximal row.  Ouch.
>
> I wonder how hard it would be to make the indexscan give up after hitting
> N consecutive dead rows, for some suitable N, maybe ~1000.  From the
> planner's viewpoint it'd be easy enough to fall back to using whatever
> it had in the histogram after all.  But that's all happening down inside
> index_getnext, and I'm hesitant to stick some kind of wart into that
> machinery for this purpose.

ISTM what we really want here is a time-based behavior, not number of
rows. Given that, could we do the index probe in a subtransaction, set
an alarm for X ms, and simply abort the subtransaction if the alarm fires?
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com