Re: GSoC idea - Simulated annealing to search for query plans

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 10:59:50PM +0100, Grzegorz Parka wrote:
> Dear Hackers,
> 
> I'm Grzegorz Parka, BSc Engineer of Technical Physics and student of
> Computer Science at WUT, Poland. Last year I've been a bit into
> evolutionary algorithms and during my research I found out about GEQO in
> Postgres. I also found out that there are plans to try a different attempt
> to find optimal query plans and thought it could be a good thing to use it
> as a project for GSoC.
> 
> I'm interested in one of old TODO items related to the optimizer -
> 'Consider compressed annealing to search for query plans'. I believe this
> would be potentially beneficial to Postgres to check if such a heuristic
> could really choose better query plans than GEQO does. Judging by the
> results that simulated annealing gives on the travelling salesman problem,
> it looks like a simpler and potentially more effective way of combinatorial
> optimization.
> 
> As deliverables of such a project I would provide a simple implementation
> of basic simulated annealing optimizer and some form of quantitative
> comparison with GEQO.
> 
> I see that this may be considerably bigger than most of GSoC projects, but
> I would like to know your opinion. Do you think that this would be
> beneficial enough to make a proper GSoC project? I would also like to know
> if you have any additional ideas about this project.
> 
> Best regards,
> Grzegorz Parka

Hi,

I think someone already mentioned it, but it would be very neat if the
optimizer could be pluggable. Then many different algorithms could be
evaluated more easily.

Regards,
Ken