Book Image

PostgreSQL for Data Architects

By : Jayadevan M
Book Image

PostgreSQL for Data Architects

By: Jayadevan M

Overview of this book

This book is for developers and data architects who have some exposure to databases. It is assumed that you understand the basic concepts of tables and common database objects, including privileges and security.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Finding the execution plan


Now, we know that the planner has quite a few decisions to make and that these decisions will ultimately decide the execution time as well as consumption of resources (CPU, memory, and disk I/O). How do we know what decision the planner will take? We can use the EXPLAIN command to find out the possible (note that it's possible) execution plan. To use EXPLAIN, we have to just prefix the EXPLAIN word to the SQL statement we want to execute, as shown here:

EXPLAIN SELECT first_name FROM customer_master
WHERE first_name = 'Carolee';
                           QUERY PLAN                            
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Seq Scan on customer_master  (cost=0.00..271.62 rows=3 width=6)
   Filter: ((first_name)::text = 'Carolee'::text)
(2 rows)

The query plan should be read from most indented to least intended: from bottom to top. Each line with cost/rows/width is a node. The inner (child) nodes feed the outer (parent) nodes. In...