Re: 500x speed-down: Wrong statistics!

Tom Lane wrote:
> Alessandro Baretta <a.baretta@barettadeit.com> writes:
>
>>I have no clue as to how or why the statistics were wrong
>>yesterday--as I vacuum-analyzed continuously out of lack of any better
>>idea--and I was stupid enough to re-timestamp everything before
>>selecting from pg_stats.
>
>
> Too bad.  I would be interested to find out how, if the stats were
> up-to-date, the thing was still getting the row estimate so wrong.
> If you manage to get the database back into its prior state please
> do send along the pg_stats info.

I have some more information on this issue, which clears PostgreSQL's planner of
all suspects. I am observing severe corruption of the bookkeeping fields managed
by the xdbs rule/trigger "complex". I am unable to pinpoint the cause, right
now, but the effect is that after running a few hours' test on the end-user
application (which never interacts directly with xdbs_* fields, and thus cannot
possibly mangle them) most tuples (the older ones, apparently) get thei
timestamps set to NULL. Before vacuum-analyzing the table, yesterday's
statistics were in effect, and the planner used the appropriate indexes. Now,
after vacuum-analyzing the table, the pg_stats row for the xdbs_modified field
no longer exists (!), and the planner has reverted to the Nested Loop Seq Scan
join strategy. Hence, all the vacuum-analyzing I was doing when complaining
against the planner was actually collecting completely screwed statistics, and
this is why the ALTER TABLE ... SET STATISTICS 1000 did not help at all!

Ok. I plead guilty and ask for the clemency of the court. I'll pay my debt with
society with a long term of pl/pgsql code debugging...

Alex