Re: Troubleshooting a long running delete statement

If finding the rows is fast, but actually deleting them is slow and perhaps won't even finish, I would strongly consider adding a where clause such that a small fraction of the deletes would be done (perhaps in a transaction that gets rolled back) and do the explain (analyze, buffers) on that modified command. Yes, the planner may decide to use an index to find which rows to delete, but if finding the rows was already fast and it is the non-obvious work that we want to profile, then it should be fine to do 1% of the deletes and see how it performs and where the time goes.