On 11/7/07, Guillaume Smet <guillaume.smet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > While studying a query taking forever after an ANALYZE on a never > analyzed database (a bad estimate causes a nested loop on a lot of > tuples), I found the following problem: [snip] > Total runtime: 31.097 ms [snip] > Total runtime: 31.341 ms [snip] > Total runtime: 34.778 ms > > Which is a really good estimate. That's a difference of less than *three milliseconds* -- a difference probably way within the expected overhead of running "explain analyze". Furthermore, all three queries use the same basic plan: a sequential scan with a filter. At any rate you're microbenchmarking in a way that is not useful to real-world queries. In what way are these timings a problem? Have you tried using an index which supports prefix searches? The text_pattern_ops operator class lets yo do this with a plain B-tree index: create index cms_items_ancestors_index on cms_items (ancestors text_pattern_ops); analyze cms_items; Now all "like 'prefix%'" queries should use the index. Alexander. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq