Re: Volunteer to build a configuration tool

Pierre C <lists@peufeu.com>

From: PFC <lists@peufeu.com>
To: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Date: 2007-06-20T07:49:02Z
Lists: pgsql-performance
> To me, the worst catch-22 we face in this area is that we'd like the
> optimizer's choices of plan to be stable and understandable, but the
> real-world costs of queries depend enormously on short-term conditions
> such as how much of the table has been sucked into RAM recently by
> other queries.  I have no good answer to that one.

	Yeah, there is currently no way to tell the optimizer things like :

	- this table/portion of a table is not frequently accessed, so it won't  
be in the cache, so please use low-seek plans (like bitmap index scan)
	- this table/portion of a table is used all the time so high-seek-count  
plans can be used like index scan or nested loops since everything is in  
RAM

	Except planner hints (argh) I see no way to give this information to the  
machine... since it's mostly in the mind of the DBA. Maybe a per-table  
"cache temperature" param (hot, warm, cold), but what about the log table,  
the end of which is cached, but not the old records ? It's messy.

	Still PG does a pretty excellent job most of the time.