Re: In progress INSERT wrecks plans on table

Mark Kirkwood <mark.kirkwood@catalyst.net.nz> writes:
> Unfortunately a trigger will not really do the job - analyze ignores in
> progress rows (unless they were added by the current transaction), and
> then the changes made by analyze are not seen by any other sessions. So
> no changes to plans until the entire INSERT is complete and COMMIT
> happens (which could be a while - too long in our case).

I'm not sure I believe the thesis that plans won't change at all.
The planner will notice that the physical size of the table is growing.
That may not be enough, if the table-contents statistics are missing
or completely unreflective of reality, but it's something.

It is true that *already cached* plans won't change until after an
ANALYZE is done (the key point there being that ANALYZE sends out a
shared-inval message to force replanning of plans for the table).
Conceivably you could issue concurrent ANALYZEs occasionally while
the INSERT is running, not so much to update the stats --- because
they wouldn't --- as to force cached-plan invalidation.

            regards, tom lane