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alternate approaches to warning about "millions of sequential scans" #1208

Closed as duplicate

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@r2evans

Upgraded from NC-34 to 35.0.1, now I see what is now a warning I cannot easily fix:

Some tables have many sequential scans and no index scans, suggesting a missing index.

2 table(s) have > 1M sequential scans without any index scans.

    oc_share
    oc_mimetypes

Some sleuthing suggests going into internal databases in order to squelch this, I think that's in general a bad idea.

Suggestions?

  1. Count sequential scans over time, not just overall. My instances of NC are many years old, counting the number of scans over that period is a naive metric.
  2. For those two tables (any others?), don't warn about it. Or call it a Note. But certainly not a Warning, otherwise I'll hit alarm-fatigue.

I've been using NC for years, but for newer users, less-tolerant users, and/or those who are less invested in NC in general, I suggest it isn't hard to imagine them migrating away due to untrusted warnings/alarms that cannot be easily dealt with.

I like warnings/alarms, I invest time periodically to assess the health of my servers. But alarm-fatigue is a real thing and I measure and value the admin time I need for each service. As it adds up, the "value" changes, and we are smart to reassess things. Please help improve the warning process, I don't think bullet 1 is onerous, and it'll go a long way to normalizing this type of problem (which can be quite real and impactful, I suspect).

Thanks!

Activity

  1. pringelmann commented on Oct 20, 2026

    @pringelmann

    Related: #1157 covers the same check giving false positives on small tables. It may be considered in future depending on 👍 votes on the original post.

  2. kesselb commented on Nov 8, 2026

    @kesselb
    Collaborator

    Thanks for writing this up, @r2evans, and sorry for the slow reply! The false positives you're seeing on oc_share and oc_mimetypes have the same cause as #1157: the check counts total sequential scans and never looks at table size or how old the counter is. I'm closing this as a duplicate so the discussion stays in one place.

    Your first suggestion, counting scans over time instead of in total since the stats were last reset, isn't in #1157 yet and would help fix the check. Could you add it as a comment there? That keeps it attached to the work when someone picks it up. Thanks!

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