On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 05:30:31PM +0400, Ilja Golshtein wrote: > Hi! > > >> Could anybody help me with this [artificial] query > >> > >> select ctid from aaa where ctid in (select ctid from aaa limit 10); > > [skipped] > > >I think using an indexed field would probably be faster for you, > >especially if you have a PK on the table. > > I used to think ctid is the same as rowid in Oracle, > where rowid access is the fastest. Is it wrong? I don't know what is rowid internally, but in Postgres, ctid _is_ the fastest way to access a (single) tuple, because it's the physical address. However, since the ctid datatype does not implement hashjoin nor mergejoin, the plans are not as good when you have to access lots of tuples. > After all, why oid is faster then ctid? Accessing single values by oid, even when there is an index, will be slower than accessing single values by ctid; though in practice, probably there won't be a measurable difference. If you are too worried about it, you could look at what is needed to implement hashjoin and mergejoin for ctids. I take it it isn't trivial, or it would be done already, but I don't think it's too hard (unless there is an implementation detail that makes it impossible). -- Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]alvh.no-ip.org>) "Nadie esta tan esclavizado como el que se cree libre no siendolo" (Goethe) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly