On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 8:00 PM, David Johnston <polobo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > You could avoid the synchronization issues by putting the hash in an index...in theory...I'd wait for someone else to opine on that particular option. Yes, a functional index on MD5(your_bytea_column) will work and is the way to go for equality comparisons on bytea values. You can use the built-in MD5() function or one of the various hash functions in pgcrypto. You can also save some index size by only storing the bytea-encoded md5 result in the index, something like: CREATE INDEX bigcol_idx ON foo (decode(MD5(bigcol), 'hex')); And then run formulate your queries similarly so they use the index: test=# EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT * FROM foo WHERE (decode(md5(bigcol), 'hex')) = (decode(md5('4'), 'hex')); QUERY PLAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Index Scan using bigcol_idx on foo (cost=0.00..8.28 rows=1 width=4) (actual t ime=0.032..0.034 rows=1 loops=1) Index Cond: (decode(md5(bigcol), 'hex'::text) = '\xa87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7 542122c'::bytea) Total runtime: 0.095 ms (3 rows) Josh -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general