Re: generalizing the planner knobs

Greg Stark gsstark@mit.edu writes:
> You more or less missed my entire point.

Only because I am still getting used to how powerful and flexible
Postgres is; but I am working on expanding my horizons.

> In the extreme, no amount of added intelligence in the optimizer is
going
> to
> help it come up with any sane selectivity estimate for something like
>
>   WHERE radius_authenticate(user) = 'OK'

yeah, I can see where something like this would be problematic.  While I
still think that in an ideal world, you want to leave all of this to the
engine, it is true that in the real world sometimes we still have to do
some of the thinking for the computer.  It's just that I've seen code
absolutely littered with optimizer hints, and that really bothers me.
But you can't not build a useful tool just because some would abuse it.

Mike Pollard
SUPRA Server SQL Engineering and Support
Cincom Systems, Inc.