Re: Indices and time spans

Itai Zukerman <zukerman@math-hat.com> writes:
> I have this:
>       SELECT ...
>       FROM trade, entry
>       WHERE AGE( CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, posted ) <= '5 minutes'::TIMESPAN
>         AND trade.entryId = entry.entryId

> That is, fetch all trades executed in the last 5 minutes.

> This query seems to run pretty slowly when trade is filled.  Putting
> an index on trade ( posted ) doesn't seem to help any

No, it wouldn't, since the indexscan machinery can only deal with
WHERE clauses that look like "indexed_column relational_op constant".
You need to recast the clause as something like
     WHERE posted >= (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - '5 minutes'::TIMESPAN)

Then you still have the problem of persuading Postgres that it should
treat the right side of this as a constant and not something to
re-evaluate at each row.  In 7.0 and later it's possible to do that
with creative use of a user-defined function marked "iscachable"
(for details see the archives for the last time this question came up,
a few months back).  But the lowest-tech solution may be to calculate
the cutoff time on the application side, so you can just send it as a
constant to begin with.
        regards, tom lane