Craig, What version of postgres are you using? I just tested this on PG 8.1.2 and was unable to reproduce these results. I wrote a simple function that returns the same text passed to it, after sleeping for 1 second. I use it in a where clause, like your example below, and regardless of the number of rows in the table, it still takes roughly 1 second, indicating to me the function is only called once. Is it possible that your function really isn't immutable? Would PG realize this and fall back to treating it as VOLATILE ? -----Original Message----- From: pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Craig A. James Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 9:11 PM To: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [PERFORM] Trivial function query optimized badly Well, once again I'm hosed because there's no way to tell the optimizer the cost for a user-defined function. I know this issue has already been raised (by me!) several times, but I have to remind everyone about this. I frequently must rewrite my SQL to work around this problem. Here is the function definition: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION cansmiles(text) RETURNS text AS '/usr/local/pgsql/lib/libchem.so', 'cansmiles' LANGUAGE 'C' STRICT IMMUTABLE; Here is the bad optimization: db=> explain analyze select version_id, 'Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O' from version where version.isosmiles = cansmiles('Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O', 1); QUERY PLAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------- Seq Scan on version (cost=0.00..23.41 rows=1 width=4) (actual time=1434.281..1540.253 rows=1 loops=1) Filter: (isosmiles = cansmiles('Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O'::text, 1)) Total runtime: 1540.347 ms (3 rows) I've had to break it up into two separate queries. Ironically, for large databases, Postgres does the right thing -- it computes the function, then uses the index on the "isosmiles" column. It's blazingly fast and very satisfactory. But for small databases, it apparently decides to recompute the function once per row, making the query N times slower (N = number of rows) than it should be! In this instance, there are 1000 rows, and factor of 10^4 is a pretty dramatic slowdown... To make it work, I had to call the function separately then use its result to do the select. db=> explain analyze select cansmiles('Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O', 1); QUERY PLAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------ Result (cost=0.00..0.01 rows=1 width=0) (actual time=1.692..1.694 rows=1 loops=1) Total runtime: 1.720 ms (2 rows) db=> explain analyze select version_id, 'Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O' from version where version.isosmiles = 'Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O'; QUERY PLAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------- Index Scan using i_version_isosmiles on version (cost=0.00..5.80 rows=1 width=4) (actual time=0.114..0.117 rows=1 loops=1) Index Cond: (isosmiles = 'Brc1ccc2nc(cn2c1)C(=O)O'::text) Total runtime: 0.158 ms (3 rows) Craig ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
