Using Index Advisor v8

Index Advisor helps you determine the application tables (and columns) on which you should create common B-tree type indexes. This can reduce the execution cost of queries you expect to use on your tables. Index Advisor comes pre-installed with EDB Postgres (R) Advanced Server. Index Advisor works with Advanced Server's query planner by creating "hypothetical indexes" for the query planner to use to calculate execution costs if such indexes were available.

Before using Index Advisor, you must:

  1. Modify the postgresql.conf file on each Advanced Server host, adding the index_advisor library to the shared_preload_libraries parameter.

  2. Install the Index Advisor contrib module. To install the module, use the psql client or PEM Query tool to connect to the database, and invoke the following command:

    <complete_path>/share/contrib/index_advisor.sql

  3. Restart the server for your changes to take effect.

After installing Index Advisor, you can select one or more rows from within a trace, and select the Index Advisor icon to access Index Advisor functionality. For detailed installation and usage information about Index Advisor, please see the EDB Postgres Advanced Server Guide, available from the EnterpriseDB website at:

http://www.enterprisedb.com

Note

It is recommended that you disable the index advisor while using the pg_dump functionality.