Benefit to adding an Index for an order by column?

user_2816949 0
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We have a large table (2.8M rows) where we are finding a single row by our device_token column

CREATE TABLE public.rpush_notifications (
    id bigint NOT NULL,
    device_token character varying,
    data text,
    created_at timestamp without time zone NOT NULL,
    updated_at timestamp without time zone NOT NULL,
...

We are constantly doing the following query:

SELECT * FROM rpush_notifications WHERE device_token = '...' ORDER BY updated_at DESC LIMIT 1

I'd like to add a index for our device_token column, and I'm wondering if there is any benefit to creating an additional index for updated_at or creating a multicolumn index for both columns device_token and updated_at given that we are ordering by, i.e.:

CREATE INDEX foo ON rpush_notifications(device_token, updated_at)

I have been unable to find an answer that would help me understand if there would be any performance benefit to adding updated_at to the index given the query we are running above. Any help appreciated. We are running Postgresql11

postgresql-11 postgresql
1 Answers

There is a performance benefit if you combine both columns just like you did ((device_token, updated_at)), because the database can easily find the entries with the specific device_token and it does not need to do the sorting during the query.

Even better would be an index on (device_token, updated_at DESC) as it gives you the requested row as the first one with this device_token, so there is no need to get the first and start a sequential scan from there on to find the last.

user_120225650
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