Consider startup cost as a figure of merit for partial paths.

Robert Haas <rhaas@postgresql.org>

Commit: 8300d3ad4aa73dc6beec8dca7d9362dbc21c9a83
Author: Robert Haas <rhaas@postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-03-09T12:16:30Z
Consider startup cost as a figure of merit for partial paths.

Previously, the comments stated that there was no purpose to considering
startup cost for partial paths, but this is not the case: it's perfectly
reasonable to want a fast-start path for a plan that involves a LIMIT
(perhaps over an aggregate, so that there is enough data being processed
to justify parallel query but yet we don't want all the result rows).

Accordingly, rewrite add_partial_path and add_partial_path_precheck to
consider startup costs. This also fixes an independent bug in
add_partial_path_precheck: commit e22253467942fdb100087787c3e1e3a8620c54b2
failed to update it to do anything with the new disabled_nodes field.
That bug fix is formally separate from the rest of this patch and could
be committed separately, but I think it makes more sense to fix both
issues together, because then we can (as this commit does) just make
add_partial_path_precheck do the cost comparisons in the same way as
compare_path_costs_fuzzily, which hopefully reduces the chances of
ending up with something that's still incorrect.

This patch is based on earlier work on this topic by Tomas Vondra,
but I have rewritten a great deal of it.

Co-authored-by: Robert Haas <rhaas@postgresql.org>
Co-authored-by: Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmobRufbUSksBoxytGJS1P+mQY4rWctCk-d0iAUO6-k9Wrg@mail.gmail.com

Files

Discussion