From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, jonah.harris@gmail.com
Subject: Re: About method of PostgreSQL's Optimizer
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 08:44:02 -0700
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Pryscila,

> > There are other methods for query optimization, one of them is based on
> > plan transformations (for example, using A-Star algorithm) instead of
> > plan constructions used by PostgreSQL.

We do certainly need a specific optimization for large star-schema joins.  I'm 
not certain that A* is suitable for our cost model, though; I think we might 
need to work up something more particular to Postgres.

> > Does anyone know why this method was choosen? Are there any papers or
> > researches about it?

There probably are on ACM but I've not read them.   Ours is a pretty 
straightforward implementation of a cost-based optimizer.   You can always 
read the code ;-)

Mark Kirkwood put together this nice paper on planner statistics:
http://www.powerpostgresql.com/PlanStats

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco