[Gllug] Thoughts on the breadth of Free Software

Richard Jones rich at annexia.org
Mon Sep 18 08:02:48 UTC 2006


On Sun, Sep 17, 2006 at 10:52:57PM +0100, Nix wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Richard Jones said:
> > * It'd be great if PostgreSQL could optimise itself - creating indexes
> > on the fly.  Take a demanding web application, examine the queries it
> > uses most often, and work out which indexes need to be added to
> > optimise it.
> 
> This surely depends upon the ability to build an index without locking
> the table: alas, this is exceptionally difficult stuff :( you can't use
> normal snapshots because you'd end up locking almost everything in the
> table against updates, and if you avoid that you have to consider
> things like rows appearing, disappearing and changing index order in
> the middle of the build.

Thankfully it doesn't actually need to add the index.  A tool which I
could point at the database, would collect stats about the most common
queries over a period of several days, then suggest indexes which
could be added[1], would be immensely useful.

Rich.

[1] Or other optimisations, such as denormalising certain tables.

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