Re: Insert performance vs Table size

Hi,

At 13:50 27/06/2005, Praveen Raja wrote:
>Just to clear things up a bit, the scenario that I'm interested in is a
>table with a large number of indexes on it (maybe 7-8).

If you're after performance you'll want to carefully consider which indexes 
are really useful and/or redesign your schema so that you can have less 
indexes on that table. 7 or 8 indexes is quite a lot, and that really has a 
cost.

>  In this scenario
>other than the overhead of having to maintain the indexes (which I'm
>guessing is the same regardless of the size of the table)

Definitely not: indexes grow with the size of the table. Depending on what 
columns you index (and their types), the indexes may be a fraction of the 
size of the table, or they may be very close in size (in extreme cases they 
may even be larger). With 7 or 8 indexes, that can be quite a large volume 
of data to manipulate, especially if the values of the columns inserted can 
span the whole range of the index (rather than being solely id- or 
time-based, for instance, in which case index updates are concentrated in a 
small area of each of the indexes), as this means you'll need to have a 
majority of the indexes in RAM if you want to maintain decent performance.

>does the size of the table play a role in determining insert performance 
>(and I mean
>only insert performance)?

In this case, it's really the indexes that'll cause you trouble, though 
heavily fragmented tables (due to lots of deletes or updates) will also 
incur a penalty just for the data part of the inserts.

Also, don't forget the usual hints if you are going to do lots of inserts:
- batch them in large transactions, don't do them one at a time
- better yet, use COPY rather than INSERT
- in some situations, you might be better of dropping the indexes, doing 
large batch inserts, then re-creating the indexes. YMMV depending on the 
existing/new ratio, whether you need to maintain indexed access to the 
tables, etc.
- pay attention to foreign keys

Jacques.