On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com> wrote:
> Tom Lane writes:
>
>> Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com> writes:
>>>
>>> I am trying to do
>>> select max(primary_key) from some_table;
>>
>> Are there a whole lot of nulls in that column?
>
>
> Zero nulls. It is a primary key.
do a big delete recently? any other open transactions? since you are
i/o waiting, I'm guessing either hint bits or you have another
transaction in play which established tons of rows that your query has
to wade through...
the remedy for the former is to simply eat it (one time penalty) or
rebuild the table. for the latter you simply have to resolve the
other transaction.
how big is your table according to pg_relation_size()?
merlin