Re: generalizing the planner knobs

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 01:07:10PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jaime Casanova <systemguards@gmail.com> writes:
> >> BTW, there's another end to the 'enable_seqscan=false' problem... it
> >> sometimes doesn't work!
> 
> > I have often considered that this is an indication that seq scan is
> > actually the better plan...
> 
> There are cases where it is the *only* plan, eg, you have no relevant
> indexes.  I am not sure that applies to Jim's complaint though.

IIRC I ran into this when I was working on generating some numbers about
how well a high correlation improves the performance of an index scan
(since afaict the cost estimator for index scan is rather broken :( ) In
that case, I had defined an index on a ~120M row table on a collumn with
a very low correlation. It's pretty much a given that a seqscan and sort
would be faster than the index scan, but it would have still been good
to be able to verify that. Because of how enable_seqscan works, I
couldn't.

BTW,
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2005-04/msg00669.php is
where I first mentioned this, including the cost function that I think
is broken.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461