Temporarily “Dropping” a PostgreSQL Index
Dec 05, 2006 in PostgreSQL
> BTW, the cute way to do that is > BEGIN; > DROP INDEX unwanted; > EXPLAIN ANALYZE whatever...; > ROLLBACK; > > No need to actually rebuild the index when you are done. > > This does hold an exclusive lock on the table for the duration of your > experiment, so maybe not such a good idea in a live environment ... but > then again, dropping useful indexes in a live environment isn't a good > idea either, and this at least reduces the duration of the experiment by > a good deal.
I found this comment by Tom Lane in the Postgresql mailing list archive yesterday. A pretty nifty trick, and perhaps something useful for inclusion in a university syllabus?