Re: Two queries are better than one?

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 04:04:25PM -0700, Karim Nassar wrote:
> I ran into a situation today maintaining someone else's code where the
> sum time running 2 queries seems to be faster than 1. The original code
> was split into two queries. I thought about joining them, but
> considering the intelligence of my predecessor, I wanted to test it.
>
> The question is, which technique is really faster? Is there some hidden
> setup cost I don't see with explain analyze?

To see which technique will be faster in your application, time the
application code.  The queries you show are taking fractions of a
millisecond; the communications overhead of executing two queries
might make that technique significantly slower than just the server
execution time that EXPLAIN ANALYZE shows.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/