Re: [HACKERS] []performance issues

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 11:39, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 03:48:39PM +0400, Yaroslav Dmitriev wrote:
> > 
> > So I am still interested in PostgreSQL's ability to deal with 
> > multimillon records tables.
> 
> [x-posted and Reply-To: to -general; this isn't a development
> problem.]
> 
> We have tables with multimillion records, and they are fast.  But not
> fast to count().  The MVCC design of PostgreSQL will give you very
> few concurerncy problems, but you pay for that in the response time
> of certain kinds of aggregates, which cannot use an index.

Of course, as suggested this is easily overcome by keeping your own c
counter.

begin;
insert into bigtable values ();
update into counttable set count=count+1;
commit;

Now you get all the fun concurrency issues -- but fetching the
information will be quick.   What happens more, the counts, or the
inserts :)