On Wednesday 08 June 2011 17:39, Claudio Freire wrote: > Of course optimally executing a plan with limit is a lot different > than one without. I imagined that limit just cuts out a slice of the query results. If it can find 80000 rows in 0.5 seconds then I would have thought that returning just the first 100 of them should be just as easy. > > Just... why are you sorting by diag_id? > > I believe you would be better off sorting by timestamp than diag_id, > but I don't know what the query is supposed to do. The timestamp is only almost monotonic. I need to scan the table in slices and I use limit and offset to select the slice. I've forced the query order with some pgsql like: declare query character varying; rec record; begin -- PG 8.3 doesn't have the 'using' syntax nor 'return query execute' execute 'create temporary table tt on commit drop as ' || 'select diag_id from tdiag ' || v_where; query = 'select * from tdiag where diag_id in (select * from tt) ' || 'order by diag_id ' || v_limit || ' ' || v_offset; for rec in execute query loop return next rec; end loop; end; -- Anthony Shipman | Life is the interval Anthony.Shipman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx | between pay days. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance