Re: WIP: cross column correlation ...

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> /me prepares to go down in flames.

> Personally, I think the first thing we ought to do is add a real, bona
> fide planner hint to override the selectivity calculation manually,
> maybe something like this:

> WHERE (x < 5 AND y = 1) SELECTIVITY (0.1);

One of the criteria we've always had for a suitable hint-or-whatever-
you-call-it design is that it *not* involve decorating the queries.
There are a number of reasons for that, some of the killer ones being

(1) People frequently *can't* adjust their queries that way, because
they're coming out of some broken query generator or other. (Crappy
query generators are of course one of the prime reasons for
poor-performing queries in the first place, so you can't write this off
as not being a key use case.)

(2) Anything we do like that, we'd be locked into supporting forever,
even after we think of better solutions.

(3) People don't like decorating their queries with nonstandard stuff;
it smells of vendor lock-in. Especially if it's actually SQL syntax
and not comments. Once you put something into the DML it's just too
hard to fix applications to get rid of it (the inverse case of point
#1).

I haven't looked at Hans' patch in any detail, and don't intend to
do so while the CF is still running; but at least he got this point
right.

regards, tom lane