Re: Slow counting still true?

Em 18/09/2012 15:24, Jeff Janes escreveu:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Edson Richter <edsonrichter@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The wiki page in question has been updated today, and I see the alert in top
>> of page "Note that the following article only applies to versions of
>> PostgreSQL prior to 9.2. Index-only scans are now implemented."
>>
>> So seems that traversing indexes for count(*) would be faster on 9.2, right?
> Not really, as it still needs to visit some representation of every
> tuple.  Now, if the entire index in is RAM while the table would not
> be, it could be a lot faster.  But that is more of a special case than
> a general one.
>
>> AFAIK, for count(*) doesn't matter the order data is stored - just need to
>> load index leaf pages and count from there, right?
> That would only work if there was no concurrent activity.  If someone
> else splits on index page, some of the entries on that page could move
> to a location where they would get visited either zero times or two
> times.
I see. This is were MS SQL Server escalates row locks into page locks,
and get rid of the concurrency (at very expensive cost, IMHO).

Regards,

Edson

>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
>
>