Re: pg_plan_advice

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 9:00 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> First, any form of user control over the
> planner tends to be a lightning rod for criticism around here. I've
> come to believe that's the wrong way of thinking about it: we can want
> to improve the planner over the long term and *also* want to have
> tools available to work around problems with it in the short term.

The most frustrating real-world incidents I've had were in the course
of customers planning a major version upgrade, or worse, after
upgrading and finding that a 5 minute query now takes 5 hours. I
mention this to emphasize that workarounds will be needed also to deal
with rare unintended effects that arise from our very attempts to
improve the planner.

> Further, we should not imagine that we're going to solve problems that
> have stumped other successful database projects any time in the
> foreseeable future; no product will ever get 100% of cases right, and
> you don't need to get to very obscure cases before other products
> throw up their hands just as we do.

Right.

> it seems to be super-useful for testing. We have
> a lot of regression test cases that try to coerce the planner to do a
> particular thing by manipulating enable_* GUCs, and I've spent a lot
> of time trying to do similar things by hand, either for regression
> test coverage or just private testing. This facility, even with all of
> the bugs and limitations that it currently has, is exponentially more
> powerful than frobbing enable_* GUCs. Once you get the hang of the
> advice mini-language, you can very quickly experiment with all sorts
> of plan shapes in ways that are currently very hard to do, and thereby
> find out how expensive the planner thinks those things are and which
> ones it thinks are even legal. So I see this as not only something
> that people might find useful for in production deployments, but also
> something that can potentially be really useful to advance PostgreSQL
> development.

That sounds very useful as well.

--
John Naylor
Amazon Web Services