Message-ID: <452E7123.1090302@agliodbs.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:45:23 -0700
From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Macintosh/20060909)
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To: Csaba Nagy <nagy@ecircle-ag.com>
CC: postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
	"Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net>,
	postgres performance list <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Hints proposal
References: <20061012151439.GT28647@nasby.net>	
	<10866.1160667752@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<1160670865.28751.58.camel@coppola.muc.ecircle.de>
In-Reply-To: <1160670865.28751.58.camel@coppola.muc.ecircle.de>
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Csaba,

> I guess the angle is: I, as a practicing DBA would like to be able to
> experiment and get most out of the imperfect tool I have, and you, the
> developers, want to make the tool perfect... I don't care about perfect
> tools, it just have to do the job... hints or anything else, if I can
> make it work GOOD ENOUGH, it's all fine. And hints is something I would
> understand and be able to use.

Hmmm, if you already understand Visual Basic syntax, should we support 
that too?  Or maybe we should support MySQL's use of '0000-00-00' as the 
"zero" date because people "understand" that?

We're just not going to adopt a bad design because Oracle DBAs are used 
to it.   If we wanted to do that, we could shut down the project and 
join a proprietary DB staff.

The current discussion is:

a) Planner tweaking is sometimes necessary;
b) Oracle HINTS are a bad design for planner tweaking;
c) Can we come up with a good design for planner tweaking?

So, how about suggestions for a good design?

--Josh Berkus