On 06/03/07, Robert Treat <xzilla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Saturday 03 March 2007 10:33, Anton Melser wrote: > Hi, > I have been going around telling everyone that there is no point using > physical tables in postgres for temporary storage within a procedure. > Why bother bothering the system with something which is only used in > one procedure I said to myself... I have just learnt that with MS Sql > Server, this is not the case, and that there are locks on some system > table and temp tables eat up memory and lots of other unfortunate > things. Can someone give me a 101 on temp table considerations? Or > rather give me "the good link"? The main issue against using temp tables involve bloat of some of the system catalogs, but it's no worse than doing create/drop cycles with standard tables, and better because they don't suffer as much i/o load.
Thanks for your reply. I am managing a db that has some export scripts that don't do a drop/create, but rather a delete from at the start of the proc (6 or 7 tables used for this, and only this). Now given that there is no vacuuming at all going on - this is clearly suboptimal but in the general case is this better/worse than using temporary tables? Thanks again, Anton
