PostgreSQL – Handling Non-Unique Multicolumn Foreign Keys

You write:

Each customer can have multiple sites, but only one should be displayed in this list.

Yet, your query retrieves all rows. That would be a point to optimize. But you also do not define which site is to be picked.

Either way, it does not matter much here. Your EXPLAIN shows only 5026 rows for the site scan (5018 for the customer scan). So hardly any customer actually has more than one site. Did you ANALYZE your tables before running EXPLAIN?

From the numbers I see in your EXPLAIN, indexes will give you nothing for this query. Sequential table scans will be the fastest possible way. Half a second is rather slow for 5000 rows, though. Maybe your database needs some general performance tuning?

Maybe the query itself is faster, but "half a second" includes network transfer? EXPLAIN ANALYZE would tell us more.

If this query is your bottleneck, I would suggest you implement a materialized view.

After you provided more information I find that my diagnosis pretty much holds.

The query itself needs 27 ms. Not much of a problem there. "Half a second" was the kind of misunderstanding I had suspected. The slow part is the network transfer (plus ssh encoding / decoding, possibly rendering). You should only retrieve 100 rows, that would solve most of it, even if it means to execute the whole query every time.

If you go the route with a materialized view like I proposed you could add a serial number without gaps to the table plus index on it - by adding a column row_number() OVER (<your sort citeria here>) AS mv_id.

Then you can query:

SELECT *
FROM   materialized_view
WHERE  mv_id >= 2700
AND    mv_id <  2800;

This will perform very fast. LIMIT / OFFSET cannot compete, that needs to compute the whole table before it can sort and pick 100 rows.

pgAdmin timing

When you execute a query from the query tool, the message pane shows something like:

Total query runtime: 62 ms.

And the status line shows the same time. I quote pgAdmin help about that:

The status line will show how long the last query took to complete. If a dataset was returned, not only the elapsed time for server execution is displayed, but also the time to retrieve the data from the server to the Data Output page.

If you want to see the time on the server you need to use SQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE or the built in Shift + F7keyboard shortcut or Query -> Explain analyze. Then, at the bottom of the explain output you get something like this:

Total runtime: 0.269 ms

The error has occurred because you are referencing a column in another table which is not unique. The good answers are already given by Lennart and Balazs Papp.

I would like to explain why do we need a unique column in the parent table. As you said you want to keep duplicate values in the column used for the foreign key which is not possible while creating the table. But you can create a reference to an existing table which contains duplicate values.

If you create a primary key with non-unique index and NOVALIDATE option then it is possible. BUT this can lead to confusing results.

Let me explain a situation.

I have created a table with one column ID which has a primary key constraint with a non-unique index.

SQL>CREATE TABLE t1(id NUMBER);
SQL>CREATE INDEX t1_index on t1(id);
SQL>INSERT INTO t1 VALUES(1);
SQL>INSERT INTO t1 VALUES(1);
SQL>COMMIT;
SQL>SELECT id FROM t1;

    ID
----------
     1
     1

SQL>ALTER TABLE t1 ADD CONSTRAINT t1_pk PRIMARY KEY (id) USING INDEX t1_index NOVALIDATE;

Let's create another table to reference the first table.

SQL>CREATE TABLE t2(id NUMBER, CONSTRAINT t2_fk FOREIGN KEY(id) REFERENCES t1(id));

Generate some records.

SQL>INSERT INTO t2 VALUES(1);
SQL>COMMIT;

Table t2 has a value 1 which is referencing parent table t1 which has a duplicate value of 1. Which one the child table's id will refer to?

In the above scenario, the foreign key works fine but the primary key in table t1 works only for new values.

Conclusion: A foreign key must always refer to a column or columns declared as either PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE in Oracle.