BRIN index
Available since Postgres 9.5 and probably just what you are looking for. Much faster index creation, much smaller index. But queries are typically not as fast. The manual:
BRIN stands for Block Range Index. BRIN is designed for handling very
large tables in which certain columns have some natural correlation
with their physical location within the table. A block range is a
group of pages that are physically adjacent in the table; for each
block range, some summary info is stored by the index.
Read on, there is more.
Depesz ran a preliminiary test.
The optimum for your case: If you can write rows clustered on run_id
, your index becomes very small and creation much cheaper.
CREATE INDEX foo ON run.perception USING brin (run_id, frame)
WHERE run_id >= 266 AND run_id <= 270;
You might even just index the whole table.
Table layout
Whatever else you do, you can save 8 bytes lost to padding due to alignment requirements per row by ording columns like this:
CREATE TABLE run.perception(
id bigint NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY
, run_id bigint NOT NULL
, frame bigint NOT NULL
, by_anyone bigint NOT NULL
, by_me bigint NOT NULL
, owning_p_id bigint NOT NULL
, subj_id bigint NOT NULL
, subj_state_frame bigint NOT NULL
, obj_type_set bigint
, by_s_id integer
, seq integer
, by varchar(45) NOT NULL -- or just use type text
);
Makes your table 79 GB smaller if none of the columns has NULL values. Details:
Also, you only have three columns that can be NULL. The NULL bitmap occupies 8 bytes for 9 - 72 columns. If only one integer column is NULL, there is a corner case for a storage paradox: it would be cheaper to use a dummy value instead: 4 bytes wasted but 8 bytes saved by not needing a NULL bitmap for the row. More details here:
Partial indexes
Depending on your actual queries it might be more efficient to have these five partial indices instead of the one above:
CREATE INDEX perception_run_id266_idx ON run.perception(frame) WHERE run_id = 266;
CREATE INDEX perception_run_id266_idx ON run.perception(frame) WHERE run_id = 267;
CREATE INDEX perception_run_id266_idx ON run.perception(frame) WHERE run_id = 268;
CREATE INDEX perception_run_id266_idx ON run.perception(frame) WHERE run_id = 269;
CREATE INDEX perception_run_id266_idx ON run.perception(frame) WHERE run_id = 270;
Run one transaction for each.
Removing run_id
as index column this way saves 8 bytes per index entry - 32 instead of 40 bytes per row. Each index is also cheaper to create, but creating five instead of just one takes substantially longer for a table that's too big to stay in cache (like @Jürgen and @Chris commented). So that may or may not be useful for you.
Partitioning
Based on inheritance - the only option up to Postgres 9.5.
(The new declarative partitioning in Postgres 11 or, preferably, 12 is smarter.)
The manual:
All constraints on all children of the parent table are examined
during constraint exclusion, so large numbers of partitions are likely
to increase query planning time considerably. So the legacy inheritance
based partitioning will work well with up to perhaps a hundred partitions;
don't try to use many thousands of partitions.
Bold emphasis mine. Consequently, estimating 1000 different values for run_id
, you would make partitions spanning around 10 values each.
maintenance_work_mem
I missed that you are already adjusting for maintenance_work_mem
in my first read. I'll leave quote and advice in my answer for reference. Per documentation:
maintenance_work_mem
(integer)
Specifies the maximum amount of memory to be used by maintenance
operations, such as VACUUM
, CREATE INDEX
, and ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY
. It defaults to 64 megabytes (64MB
). Since only one of these
operations can be executed at a time by a database session, and an
installation normally doesn't have many of them running concurrently,
it's safe to set this value significantly larger than work_mem
. Larger
settings might improve performance for vacuuming and for restoring
database dumps.
Note that when autovacuum
runs, up to autovacuum_max_workers
times this memory may be allocated, so be careful not to set the default
value too high. It may be useful to control for this by separately
setting autovacuum_work_mem
.
I would only set it as high as needed - which depends on the unknown (to us) index size. And only locally for the executing session. As the quote explains, a too-high general setting can starve the server otherwise, because autovacuum may claim more RAM, too. Also, don't set it much higher than needed, even in the executing session, free RAM might be put to good use in caching data.
It could look like this:
BEGIN;
SET LOCAL maintenance_work_mem = 10GB; -- depends on resulting index size
CREATE INDEX perception_run_frame_idx_run_266_thru_270 ON run.perception(run_id, frame)
WHERE run_id >= 266 AND run_id <= 270;
COMMIT;
About SET LOCAL
:
The effects of SET LOCAL
last only till the end of the current
transaction, whether committed or not.
To measure object sizes:
The server should generally be configured reasonably otherwise, obviously.
There's no way to avoid creating a unique index if you want to efficiently ensure uniqueness for the data. The unique index is necessary for PostgreSQL to enforce uniqueness in the face of concurrent inserts, updates, and deletes.
A unique index is what backs a unique constraint; when you create a unique constraint, a unique index is created for you automatically.
The only other way to enforce uniqueness is to LOCK TABLE mytable IN EXCLUSIVE MODE
before any change to the table that might affect the column you wish to make unique. That way you don't have to create a unique index, but in exchange you can only have one transaction changing the table at a time. You could do this from a trigger only when it detects a change in the unique column, but then you'd suffer from lock upgrades that would lead to frequent deadlocks.
Really, a unique index is the way to go here.
You can mitigate the impact of the required lock by using CREATE UNIQUE INDEX ... CONCURRENTLY
then using the version of ALTER TABLE ... ADD CONSTRAINT ...
that specifies an already-created index to use for the UNIQUE
constraint.
Best Answer
I found a small workaround for this.