Month: August 2025

Who logged to system from multiple countries in 2 hours?

Yesterday someone posted a set of queries for interviews, all centered on answering business-like questions from database.

Today this post is hidden behind some “subscribe to read more" thing, so I will not even link it, but one question there caught my eye.

Since I can't copy paste the text, I'll try to write what I remember:

Given table sessions, with columns: user_id, login_time, and country_id, list all cases where single account logged to the system from more than one country within 2 hour time frame.

The idea behind is that it would be a tool to find hacked account, based on idea that you generally can't change country within 2 hours. Which is somewhat true.

Solution in the blogpost suggested joining sessions table with itself, using some inequality condition. I think we can do better…

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Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Display Memoize planner estimates in EXPLAIN

On 29th of July 2025, David Rowley committed patch:

Display Memoize planner estimates in EXPLAIN
 
There've been a few complaints that it can be overly difficult to figure
out why the planner picked a Memoize plan.  To help address that, here we
adjust the EXPLAIN output to display the following additional details:
 
1) The estimated number of cache entries that can be stored at once
2) The estimated number of unique lookup keys that we expect to see
3) The number of lookups we expect
4) The estimated hit ratio
 
Technically #4 can be calculated using #1, #2 and #3, but it's not a
particularly obvious calculation, so we opt to display it explicitly.
The original patch by Lukas Fittl only displayed the hit ratio, but
there was a fear that might lead to more questions about how that was
calculated.  The idea with displaying all 4 is to be transparent which
may allow queries to be tuned more easily.  For example, if #2 isn't
correct then maybe extended statistics or a manual n_distinct estimate can
be used to help fix poor plan choices.
 
Author: Ilia Evdokimov <ilya.evdokimov@tantorlabs.com>
Author: Lukas Fittl <lukas@fittl.com>
Reviewed-by: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrei Lepikhov <lepihov@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAP53Pky29GWAVVk3oBgKBDqhND0BRBN6yTPeguV_qSivFL5N_g%40mail.gmail.com

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 19 – Display Memoize planner estimates in EXPLAIN