Re: oracle to psql migration - slow query in postgres - Mailing list pgsql-performance

  On 10/14/2010 4:10 PM, Jon Nelson wrote:
> The first thing I'd do is think real hard about whether you really
> really want 'numeric' instead of boolean, smallint, or integer.  The
> second thing is that none of your indices (which specify a whole bunch
> of fields, by the way) have only just emailok, emailbounced, or only
> the pair of them. Without knowing the needs of your app, I would
> reconsider your index choices and go with fewer columns per index.
>
Also, make sure that the statistics is good, that histograms are large
enough and that Geico (the genetic query optimizer) will really work
hard to save you 15% or more on the query execution time. You can also
make sure that any index existing index is used,  by disabling the
sequential scan and then activating and de-activating indexes with the
dummy expressions,  just as it was done with Oracle's rule based optimizer.
I agree that a good data model is even more crucial for Postgres than is
the case with Oracle. Oracle, because of its rich assortment of tweaking
& hacking tools and parameters, can be made to perform, even if the
model is designed by someone who didn't apply the rules of good design.
Postgres is much more susceptible to bad models and it is much harder to
work around a badly designed model in Postgres than in Oracle. What
people do not understand is that every application in the world will
become badly designed after years of maintenance, adding columns,
creating additional indexes, views, tables and triggers and than
deploying various tools to design applications.  As noted by Murphy,
things develop from bad to worse. Keep Postgres models simple and
separated, because it's much easier to keep clearly defined models
simple and effective than to keep models with 700 tables and 350 views,
frequently with conflicting names, different columns named the same and
same columns named differently. And monitor, monitor, monitor. Use
strace, ltrace,  pgstatspack, auto_explain, pgfouine, pgadmin, top, sar,
iostat and all tools you can get hold of. Without the event interface,
it's frequently a guessing game.  It is, however, possible to manage
things.  If working with partitioning, be very aware that PostgreSQL
optimizer has certain problems with partitions, especially with group
functions. If you want speed, everything must be prefixed with
partitioning column: indexes, expressions, joins. There is no explicit
star schema and creating hash indexes will not buy you much, as a matter
of fact, Postgres community is extremely suspicious of the hash indexes
and I don't see them widely used.
Having said that, I was able to solve the problems with my speed and
partitioning.

--
Mladen Gogala
Sr. Oracle DBA
1500 Broadway
New York, NY 10036
(212) 329-5251
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