I have a parent table (parent_table) and few children tables inherit from it (child_one_table and child_two_table).
I want to query data using columns belong to the parent table only (the data itself is inserted to the children tables), when I run an explain on my query I see that there are sequence scans running on all the tables (parent_table, child_one_table and child_two_table).
Is there a more efficient way to do this? When I try to query using ONLY on parent_table I get back 0 result since the data was inserted to children table.
Thanks in advance!
Thanks for clarifying your question!
When I query the data for SELECT * FROM parent_table WHERE name = 'joe'; I see that it actually go over all 3 tables and query for that.
This seems to be standard behaviour from PostgreSQL. According to the 5.10.1. Caveats section of https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-inherit.html
Note that not all SQL commands are able to work on inheritance hierarchies. Commands that are used for data querying, data modification, or schema modification (e.g., SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, most variants of ALTER TABLE, but not INSERT or ALTER TABLE ... RENAME) typically default to including child tables and support the ONLY notation to exclude them.
So really what you want to do is explore the usage of ONLY to specify the scope of your query.
I hope this can help!
Related
Following the blog of Rob Conery I have set of unique IDs across the tables of my Postgres DB.
Now, using these unique IDs, is there a way to query a row on the DB without knowing what table it is in? Or can those tables be indexed such that if the row is not available on the current table, I just increase the index and I can query to the next table?
In short - if you did not prepared for that - then no. You can prepare for that by generating your own uuid. Please look here. For instance PG has uuid that preserve order. Also uuid v5 has something like namespaces. So you can build hierarchy. However that is done by hashing namespace, and I don't know tool to do opposite inside PG.
If you know all possible tables in advance you could prepare a query that simply UNIONs a search with a tagged type over all tables. In case of two tables named comments and news you could do something like:
PREPARE type_of_id(uuid) AS
SELECT id, 'comments' AS type
FROM comments
WHERE id = $1
UNION
SELECT id, 'news' AS type
FROM news
WHERE id = $1;
EXECUTE type_of_id('8ecf6bb1-02d1-4c04-8875-f1da62b7f720');
Automatically generating this could probably be done by querying pg_catalog.pg_tables and generating the relevant query on the fly.
In a PostgreSQL db I'm working on, half of the tables have one particular column, always named the same, that is of type varchar(5). The size became a bit too restricting and I want to change it to varchar(10).
The number of tables in my particular case is actually very manageable to do it by hand. But I was wondering how one could script this with a query for larger dbs. It generally should be possible in just a few steps.
Identify all the tables in the schema, then (?) filter by condition if column present.
Create ALTER TABLE statements for each table found
I have some idea about how to write a query that identifies all tables in the schema. But I wouldn't know how to filter them. And if I didn't filter them, I assume the generated alter table statements would break.
Would be great if someone could share their knowledge on this.
Thanks to Abelisto for providing some guidance. Eventually, this is how I did it.
First, I created a query that in turn creates the ALTER TABLE statements. MyDB and MyColumn need to reflect actual values.
SELECT
'ALTER TABLE '||columns.table_name||' ALTER COLUMN '||MyColumn||' TYPE varchar(20);'
FROM
information_schema.columns
WHERE
columns.table_catalog = 'MyDB' AND
columns.table_schema = 'public' AND
columns.column_name = 'MyColumn';
Then it was just a matter of executing the output as a new query. All done.
I'm trying to run the same query over multiple tables in my Postgres database, that all have the same schema.
This question: Select from multiple tables without a join?
shows that this is possible, however they are hard-coding the set of tables.
I have another query that returns the five specific tables I would like my main query to run on. How can I go about using the result of this with the UNION approach?
In short, I want my query to see the five specific tables (determined by the outcome of another query) as one large table when it runs the query.
I understand that in many cases similar to my scenario you'd simply just want to merge the tables. I can not do this.
One way of doing this that may satisfy your constraints is using table inheritance. In short, you will need to create a parent table with the same schema, and for each child you want to query you must ALTER that_table INHERIT parent_table. Any queries against the parent table will query all of the child tables. If you need to query different tables in different circumstances, I think the best way would be to add a column named type or some such, and query only certain values of that table.
I'm working on an application that imports data from Access to SQL Server 2008. Currently, I'm using a stored procedure to import the data individually by record. I can't go with a bulk insert or anything like that because the data is inserted into two related tables...I have a bunch of fields that go into the Account table (first name, last name, etc.) and three fields that will each have a record in an Insurance table, linked back to the Account table by the auto-incrementing AccountID that's selected with SCOPE_IDENTITY in the stored procedure.
Performance isn't very good due to the number of round trips to the database from the application. For this and some other reasons I'm planning to instead use a staging table and import the data from there. Reading up on my options for approaching this, a cursor that executes the same insert stored procedure on the data in the staging table would make sense. However it appears that cursors are evil incarnate and should be avoided.
Is there any way to insert data into one table, retrieve the auto-generated IDs, then insert data for the same records into another table using the corresponding ID, in a set-based operation? Or is a cursor my only option here?
Look at the OUTPUT clause. You should be able to add it to your INSERT statement to do what you want.
BTW, if you need to output columns into the second table that weren't inserted into the first one, then use MERGE instead of INSERT (as suggested in the comment to the original question) as its OUTPUT clause supports referencing other columns from the source table(s). Otherwise, keeping it with an INSERT is more straightforward, and it does give you access to the inserted identity column.
I'm having experiment to worked out in inserting multiple record into related table using databinding. So, try this!
Hopefully this is very helpful. Follow this link How to insert record into related tables. for more information.
My current query looks something like this:
SELECT SUBSTR(name,1,1), COUNT(*) FROM files GROUP BY SUBSTR(name,1,1)
But it's taking a pretty long time just to do counts on a table that's already indexed by the name column. I saw from this question that some engines might not use indexes correctly for the SUBSTR function, and in fact, sqlite will not use indexes for SUBSTR(string,1,1).
Is there any other approach that would utilize the index and net me some faster queries?
One strategy that is consistent with your access pattern is to add a new indexed column "first_letter" to your table. Use a trigger on to set the value on insert and update. Then your query is a simple group by first_letter.
Another strategy is to create a shadow table which contains an aggregation of the mother table. This isn't easy because it is your job as developer to keep the shadow table consistent with the mother table. Every delete, update or insert in table files needs to be accompanied by a change in the shadow table.
Databases like Oracle have support for materialized views to achieve this automatically but sqlite doesn't.