Re: sequential scan performance

On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 08:27:26AM -0500, Michael Engelhart wrote:
> Hi -
>
> I have a table of about 3 million rows of city "aliases" that I need
> to query using LIKE - for example:
>
> select * from city_alias where city_name like '%FRANCISCO'
>
>
> When I do an EXPLAIN ANALYZE on the above query, the result is:
>
>  Seq Scan on city_alias  (cost=0.00..59282.31 rows=2 width=42)
> (actual time=73.369..3330.281 rows=407 loops=1)
>    Filter: ((name)::text ~~ '%FRANCISCO'::text)
> Total runtime: 3330.524 ms
> (3 rows)
>
>
> this is a query that our system needs to do a LOT.   Is there any way
> to improve the performance on this either with changes to our query
> or by configuring the database deployment?   We have an index on
> city_name but when using the % operator on the front of the query
> string postgresql can't use the index .

If that's really what you're doing (the wildcard is always at the beginning)
then something like this

  create index city_name_idx on foo (reverse(city_name));

  select * from city_alias where reverse(city_name) like reverse('%FRANCISCO');

should do just what you need.

I use this, with a plpgsql implementation of reverse, and it works nicely.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION reverse(text) RETURNS text AS '
DECLARE
       original alias for $1;
       reverse_str text;
       i int4;
BEGIN
 reverse_str = '''';
 FOR i IN REVERSE LENGTH(original)..1 LOOP
  reverse_str = reverse_str || substr(original,i,1);
 END LOOP;
 return reverse_str;
END;'
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' IMMUTABLE;


Someone will no doubt suggest using tsearch2, and you might want to
take a look at it if you actually need full-text search, but my
experience has been that it's too slow to be useful in production, and
it's not needed for the simple "leading wildcard" case.

Cheers,
  Steve