Re: Rename max_parallel_degree?

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
>> > On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 8:23 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> >> FWIW, I agree with Bruce that using "degree" here is a poor choice.
>> >> It's an unnecessary dependence on technical terminology that many people
>> >> will not be familiar with.
>>
>> > FWIW, SQL Server calls it "degree of parallelism" as well (
>> > https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188611(v=sql.105).aspx). And
>> > their configuration option is "max degree of parallelism":
>> > https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181007(v=sql.105).aspx.
>>
>> Yes, but both they and Oracle appear to consider "degree" to mean the
>> total number of processors used, not the number of secondary jobs in
>> addition to the main one.  The only thing worse than employing obscure
>> technical terminology is employing it incorrectly:
>
> What about calling it something even simpler, such as "max_parallelism"?
> This avoids such cargo cult, and there's no implication that it's
> per-query.

So what would we call the "parallel_degree" member of the Path data
structure, and the "parallel_degree" reloption?  I don't think
renaming either of those to "parallelism" is going to be an
improvement.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company