Re: count(*) slow on large tables

Dror Matalon wrote:

> I smell a religious war in the aii:-). 
> Can you go several days in a row without doing select count(*) on any
> of your tables? 
> 
> I suspect that this is somewhat a domain specific issue. In some areas
> you don't need to know the total number of rows in your tables, in
> others you do. 

If I were you, I would have an autovacuum daemon running and rather than doing 
select count(*), I would look at stats generated by vacuums. They give 
approximate number of tuples and it should be good enough it is accurate within 
a percent.

Just another approach of achieving same thing.. Don't be religious about running 
a qeury from SQL prompt. That's it..

  Shridhar