From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Reply-To: josh@agliodbs.com
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Simple join optimized badly?
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:28:29 -0700
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Cc: "Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	Tobias Brox <tobias@nordicbet.com>, Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
References: <20061009213303.GA19144@oppetid.no>
	<17519.1160489688@sss.pgh.pa.us> <20061010142101.GD72517@nasby.net>
In-Reply-To: <20061010142101.GD72517@nasby.net>
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Message-Id: <200610101028.30191.josh@agliodbs.com>

Jim,

> We've depricated things before, I'm sure we'll do it again. Yes, it's a
> pain, but it's better than not having anything release after release.
> And having a formal hint language would at least allow us to eventually
> clean up some of these oddball cases, like the OFFSET 0 hack.
>
> I'm also not convinced that even supplimental statistics will be enough
> to ensure the planner always does the right thing, so query-level hints
> may have to stay (though it'd be great if that wasn't the case).

"stay"?   I don't think that the general developers of PostgreSQL are going 
to *accept* anything that stands a significant chance of breaking in one 
release.   You have you challange for the EDB development team: come up 
with a hinting language which is flexible enough not to do more harm than 
good (hint: it's not Oracle's hints).

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco