Re: LIMIT in DECLARE CURSOR: request for comments

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> Tom Lane writes:
>> 1. If DECLARE CURSOR does not contain a LIMIT, continue to plan on the
>> basis of 10%-or-so fetch

> I'd say that normally you're not using cursors because you intend to throw
> away 80% or 90% of the result set, but instead you're using it because
> it's convenient in your programming environment (e.g., ecpg).  There are
> other ways of getting only some rows, this is not it.

I didn't say I was assuming that the user would only fetch 10% of the
rows.  Since what we're really doing is a linear interpolation between
startup and total cost, what this is essentially doing is favoring low
startup cost, but not to the complete exclusion of total cost.  I think
that that describes the behavior we want for a cursor pretty well.

It remains to argue about what the relative weighting ought to be
... which might be best answered by making it user-settable.
        regards, tom lane