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Re: pg_plan_advice

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

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From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Matheus Alcantara <matheusssilv97@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-03-19T23:11:18Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Thu, Mar 19, 2026 at 6:43 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> It would, but it's conceptually ugly and it might make it much harder
> to detangle the cause of a failure, so I don't care for it much.

It does carry that risk. *Typically* failures are going to be a
WARNING message complaining about something related to advice, so the
chance of confusion is perhaps not as high as it would be in some
other cases -- but the grison failure is a counterexample. I'm
somewhat inclined to discount that particular counterexample because
the bug is entirely unrelated to test_plan_advice or pg_plan_advice,
so I am not sure it really would have mattered if we hadn't known that
test_plan_advice was what precipitated it. But there might be other
cases where that isn't so.

> I don't have any great ideas here.  Your point about the test having
> helped to find a lot of bugs is compelling, and so is the fact that
> it's seemingly exposing more issues we've not understood yet.
> Maybe we can eventually buy back the cycles by not running it by
> default, but clearly now is not the time for that.

OK, thanks. To be honest, my biggest fear here is not that the test
doesn't have enough value, but that it has a little too much value,
i.e. that we're going to find that future planner improvements require
pg_plan_advice adjustments more often than we're all comfortable with.
Hopefully that fear is unjustified, but we're not going to know for a
while.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. pg_plan_advice: Fix another unique-semijoin bug.

  2. pg_plan_advice: Export feedback-related definitions.

  3. pg_plan_advice: Fix a bug when a subquery is pruned away entirely.

  4. pg_plan_advice: Add alternatives test to Makefile.

  5. pg_plan_advice: Handle non-repeatable TABLESAMPLE scans.

  6. pg_stash_advice: Allow stashed advice to be persisted to disk.

  7. Add pg_stash_advice contrib module.

  8. pg_plan_advice: Avoid assertion failure with partitionwise aggregate.

  9. pg_plan_advice: Invent DO_NOT_SCAN(relation_identifier).

  10. Add an alternative_plan_name field to PlannerInfo.

  11. pg_plan_advice: Refactor to invent pgpa_planner_info

  12. Respect disabled_nodes in fix_alternative_subplan.

  13. get_memoize_path: Don't exit quickly when PGS_NESTLOOP_PLAIN is unset.

  14. test_plan_advice: Set TAP test priority 50 in meson.build.

  15. pg_plan_advice: Avoid a crash under GEQO.

  16. Test pg_plan_advice using a new test_plan_advice module.

  17. pg_plan_advice: Always install pg_plan_advice.h, and in the right place

  18. pg_plan_advice: Fix failures to accept identifier keywords.

  19. Add pg_plan_advice contrib module.

  20. Allow extensions to mark an individual index as disabled.

  21. Replace get_relation_info_hook with build_simple_rel_hook.

  22. Store information about Append node consolidation in the final plan.

  23. Store information about elided nodes in the final plan.

  24. Store information about range-table flattening in the final plan.

  25. Pass cursorOptions to planner_setup_hook.

  26. Fix PGS_CONSIDER_NONPARTIAL interaction with Materialize nodes.

  27. Fix mistakes in commit 4020b370f214315b8c10430301898ac21658143f

  28. Allow for plugin control over path generation strategies.

  29. Update some comments for fasthash

  30. Allow passing a pointer to GetNamedDSMSegment()'s init callback.

  31. Don't reset the pathlist of partitioned joinrels.

  32. Treat number of disabled nodes in a path as a separate cost metric.