> I have been reading all this technical talk about costs and such that > I don't (_yet_) understand. > > Now I'm scared... what's the fastest way to do an equivalent of > count(*) on a table to know how many items it has? Make sure to analyze the database frequently and check pg_class for reltuples field. This gives 0 time approximations of # row in table at the time of the last analyze. Many other approaches...check archives. Also your requirements are probably not as high as you think they are ;) Merlin
