Re: [HACKERS] Hints proposal

On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 02:21:55PM -0400, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> third way: to solve the problem of data (especially constants) not
> being available to the planner at the time the plan was generated.
> this happens most often with prepared statements and sql udfs. note
> that changes to the plan generation mechanism (i think proposed by
> peter e a few weeks back) might also solve this.

You're right about this, but you also deliver the reason why we don't
need hints for that: the plan generation mechanism is a better
solution to that problem. It's this latter thing that I keep coming
back to. As a user of PostgreSQL, the thing that I really like about
it is its pragmatic emphasis on correctness. In my experience, it's
a system that feels very UNIX-y: there's a willingness to accept
"80/20" answers to a problem in the event you at least have a way to
get the last 20, but the developers are opposed to anything that
seems really kludgey.

In the case you're talking about, it seems to me that addressing the
problems where they come from is a better solution that trying to
find some way to work around them. And most of the use-cases I hear
for a statement-level hints system fall into this latter category.

A
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