Question

After I get excellent results with converting data “to_timestamp” and “to_number” from VB.NET I am wondering if PostgreSQL have possibility to query table indexes by array of integers from .NET?

Say, I have array filled with (1, 3, 5, 6, 9).
Is here any possibility that PostgreSQL return rows with data from those indexes to “odbc.reader”?
That would be much faster than looping and querying 5 times like I do now.

Something like this:

SELECT myindexes, myname, myadress from mytable WHERE myindexes IS IN ARRAY 

If this is possible how a simple query should look like?

Answer 1

That’s possible.

ANY

SELECT myindex, myname, myadress
FROM   mytable
WHERE  myindex = ANY ($my_array)

Example with integer-array:

...
WHERE  myindex = ANY ('{1,3,5,6,9}'::int[])

Details about ANY in the manual.

IN

There is also the SQL IN() expression for the same purpose.
PostgreSQl in its current implementation transforms that to = ANY (array) internally prior to execution, so it’s conceivably a bit slower.

---

Examples for joining to a long list (as per comment):

JOIN to VALUES expression

WITH x(myindex) AS (
    VALUES
    (1),(3),(5),(6),(9)
    )
SELECT myindex, myname, myadress
FROM   mytable
JOIN   x USING (myindex)

I am using a CTE in the example (which is optional, could be a sub-query as well). You need PostgreSQL 8.4 of later for that.
The manual about VALUES.

JOIN to unnested array

Or you could unnest() an array and JOIN to it:

SELECT myindex, myname, myadress
FROM   mytable
JOIN  (SELECT unnest('{1,3,5,6,9}'::int[]) AS myindex) x USING (myindex)

Each of these methods is far superior in performance to running a separate query per value.