Adam Rich wrote:
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.
Sorry, I forgot that critical piece of info: I'm using 8.1.4. Your results would indicate that 8.1.2 creates a different plan than 8.1.4, or else there's some configuration parameter that's different between your installation and mine that causes a radically different plan to be used. I assume you vacuum/analyzed the table before you ran the query.
Is it possible that your function really isn't immutable? Would PG realize this and fall back to treating it as VOLATILE ?
Now that you say this, this seems more like a bug with the definition of IMMUTABLE. The function should only be called once if it's given a constant string, right? So the fact that Postgres called it once per row is just wrong. Craig
