What is index overhead on writes?

One of things people learn is that adding indexes isn't free. All write operations (insert, update, delete) will be slower – well, they have to update index.

But realistically – how much slower?

Full tests should involve lots of operations, on realistic data, but I just wanted to see some basic info. So I figured I'll just look at speed of inserting data (well, COPYing data), and will try to extract some knowledge from it…

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Should you use HASH index?

Today, Mattias|farm on IRC asked how to create primary key using HASH index. After some talk, he said that in some books it said that for “=" (equality) hash indexes are better.

So, I digged a bit deeper.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of PostgreSQL 10 hash indexes are WAL logged. As such, main point against them is gone.

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