Performance Tuning: Create index for boolean column

Question

I have written a daemon processor which will fetch rows from one database and insert them into another for synchronizing. It will fetch rows based on a boolean indication flag sync_done.

My table has hundreds of thousands of rows. When I select all rows with sync_done is false, will it cause any database performance issues? Should I apply indexing for that sync_done column to improve performance, since only rows with a sync_done value of false are fetched?

Say, I have 10000 rows. Of those, 9500 have already been synchronized (sync_done is true) and will not be selected.

Please suggest how I might proceed.

Answer 1

For a query like this, a partial index covering only unsynced rows would serve best.

CREATE INDEX ON tbl (id) WHERE sync_done = FALSE;

However, for a use case like this, other synchronization methods may be preferable to begin with:

• Have a look at LISTEN / NOTIFY.
• Or use a trigger in combination with dblink or a foreign data wrapper like postgres_fdw (preferably).
• Or one of the many available replication methods.
  Streaming Replication was added with Postgres 9.0 and has become increasingly popular.