Learn more about CREATE INDEX NOLOGGING in PostgreSQL. Our PostgreSQL Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

PostgreSQL CREATE INDEX NOLOGGING- A Workaround 

Did you know that is no direct equivalent of the “CREATE INDEX NOLOGGING” in PostgreSQL?

The NOLOGGING option indicates that the database engine should skip writing the index changes to the transaction log during index creation. This improves the performance but increases the risk of data loss in case of a system failure.

However, index changes are always logged in PostgreSQL, hence ensuring data integrity and consistency.

In fact, the transaction log plays a key role in PostgreSQL’s crash recovery mechanism. It records all changes to the database, index modifications, etc to ensure durability and recoverability.

Although we cannot use NOLOGGING in the “CREATE INDEX” statement in PostgreSQL, we can use different configuration parameters and options to optimize index creation and improve performance. Let’s take a look at how that works:

• We can optimize the PostgreSQL server configuration parameters to improve index creation performance. We can adjust parameters to allocate sufficient memory and parallelize the index creation process.
• PostgreSQL offers the “CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY” statement. It allows us to create an index without blocking write operations on the table. This minimizes disruption to concurrent transactions while the index is being created.
• The “fillfactor” option can be set at the table level or index level to control the amount of free space in index pages. This helps reduce index bloat and fragmentation.

At the end of the day, properly configuring PostgreSQL and utilizing the available options for index creation, helps achieve efficient and optimized index performance without sacrificing data integrity and durability.

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Conclusion

In brief, our Support Techs demonstrated a workaround to use CREATE INDEX NOLOGGING in PostgreSQL