On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Howard Cole wrote:
> Out of interest, if I could create a multicolumn index with both the primary
> key and the fts key (I don't think I can create a multi-column index using
> GIST with both the email_id and the fts field), would this reduce access to
> the table due to the primary key being part of the index?
Unfortunately not, since the indexes do not contain information on whether
a particular row is visible in your current transaction. Like I said,
concurrency control really complicates things!
> More importantly, are there other ways that I can improve performance on
> this? I am guessing that a lot of the problem is that the email table is so
> big. If I cut out some of the text fields that are not needed in the search
> and put them in another table, presumably the size of the table will be
> reduced to a point where it will reduce the number of disk hits and speed the
> query up.
Good idea. Note that Postgres is already doing this to some extent with
TOAST - read
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/storage-toast.html -
unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an option to always move
particular columns out to TOAST. Your idea will produce an even smaller
table. However, are email_ids all that you want from the query?
Matthew
--
Okay, I'm weird! But I'm saving up to be eccentric.