Re: pg temp tables

On 06/03/07, Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On Saturday 03 March 2007 10:33, Anton Melser wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I have been going around telling everyone that there is no point using
> > physical tables in postgres for temporary storage within a procedure.
> > Why bother bothering the system with something which is only used in
> > one procedure I said to myself... I have just learnt that with MS Sql
> > Server, this is not the case, and that there are locks on some system
> > table and temp tables eat up memory and lots of other unfortunate
> > things. Can someone give me a 101 on temp table considerations? Or
> > rather give me "the good link"?
>
> The main issue against using temp tables involve bloat of some of the system
> catalogs, but it's no worse than doing create/drop cycles with standard
> tables, and better because they don't suffer as much i/o load.

Thanks for your reply. I am managing a db that has some export scripts
that don't do a drop/create, but rather a delete from at the start of
the proc (6 or 7 tables used for this, and only this). Now given that
there is no vacuuming at all going on - this is clearly suboptimal but
in the general case is this better/worse than using temporary tables?
Thanks again,
Anton