Re: Glacial delete

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, P.J. "Josh" Rovero wrote:

> Have a pretty simple table with about 420K rows:
>
>                  Table "wx_grib_file"
>    Attribute   |           Type           | Modifier
> --------------+--------------------------+----------
>   grib_file_id | oid                      | not null
>   name         | character(40)            |
>   parse_time   | timestamp with time zone |
> Index: wx_grib_file_pkey
>
> In psql, trying to delete a number of rows is extremely slow. Aggregates
> (count, min, max, etc) run in a couple of seconds.  But a delete
> using a range of grib_file_id or parse_time takes about a second
> per row, which is painful for deletes of thousands of records.

Do you have any triggers or rules on the table?  Are you doing
a single delete of many records or multiple deletes of 1?  If the
latter, are you doing them in an explicit transaction or 1 transaction
per delete?  What does explain show for the delete?