On 10/10/2007, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> "James Shaw" <js102@zepler.net> writes:
> > The example given has "Seq Scan on tenk1 (cost=0.00..458.00" in the example,
> > but then says, "you will find out that tenk1 has 358 disk pages" and "the
> > cost is estimated at 358 page reads". Shouldn't this be 458 disk page
> > reads?
>
> No. Why did you stop reading in mid-sentence?
I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I've reread, and understand where the
extra 100 comes from now. Perhaps this could be reworded:
This is about as straightforward as it gets. If you do
SELECT relpages, reltuples FROM pg_class WHERE relname = 'tenk1';
you will find out that tenk1 has 358 disk pages and 10000 rows. The
estimated cost is (disk pages read * seq_page_cost) + (number of rows
read * cpu_tuple_cost). By default, seq_page_cost is 1.0 and
cpu_tuple_cost is 0.01. Therefore, the estimated cost is (358 * 1.0)
+ (10000 * 0.01) = 458.
Thanks
James