Re: What is the right way to deal with a table with rows that are not in a random order?

On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 15:03 -0400, Douglas Alan wrote:

> The application in question is a kind of data warehousing thing (of
> astronomical stars), and there's an ORM in the middle, so it's not
> easy for us to hand-tune how individual queries are specified.
> Instead, we have to structure the database and the indexes so that
> things generally perform well, without having to tweak specific
> queries.

You should look at indexing solutions, or take professional advice on
that.

> Users can specify fairly arbitrary search criteria.  All of the
> queries should perform well.  By "well", I mean within 10 seconds or
> so.

That's an unrealistic expectation, unfortunately. Fast search requires
some form of preparatory action and without any clue as to what that
should be you cannot guarantee response times.

--
 Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.com
 PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support