Re: small table left outer join big table

On Wed, 2010-12-29 at 09:59 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 7:34 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> >> It's not a bug, that's the way it currently works. We don't need a test
> >> case for that.
>
> > Oh, you're right.  I missed the fact that it's a left join.
>
> The only thing that struck me as curious about it was that the OP didn't
> get a nestloop-with-inner-indexscan plan.  That would be explainable if
> there was no index on the large table's "id" column ... but columns
> named like that usually have indexes.
>
> I can't get all *that* excited about complicating hash joins as
> proposed.  The query is still fundamentally going to be slow because
> you won't get out of having to seqscan the large table.  The only way
> to make it really fast is to not read all of the large table, and
> nestloop-with-inner-indexscan is the only plan type with a hope of
> doing that.

Seq scanning the big table isn't bad... we've gone to a lot of trouble
to make it easy to do this, especially with many users.

Maintaining many large indexes is definitely bad, all that random I/O is
going to suck badly.

Seems like an interesting and relatively optimisation to me. Not sure if
this is a request for feature, or a proposal to write the optimisation.
I hope its the latter.