Paritioning performance for full table scan on non-paritioned index We have a table in Postgres that we are considering partitioning. We occasionally query an indexed field that is separate from one with the partition key.

My question is: Can partitioning the table make this query faster? 

My instinct says it no. Instead of scanning one index we will now be scanning multiple indexes. However, another developer I work with insists that the query will be faster because instead of scanning one large index, the database will scan multiple smaller tables in parallel.
instead of scanning one large index the database will scan multiple smaller tables in parallel.


PostgreSQL does not currently support parallel query (though hopefully it isn't far away), so it will be digging through your partitions essentially one-at-a-time if you are querying based on something other than the exclusion constraint for your partitions.

It'll be up to you to test whether querying N small indexes works out faster than querying one large one for your particular use-case. FWIW, folk wisdom says probably not, but YMMV,  in particular you may do a better job vacuuming and keeping bloat down on several small partitions and indexes than with one giant table plus index(es), for instance.

See this wiki page for a starting point about the state of Parallel Query in Postgres and workarounds.