Jim, > We've depricated things before, I'm sure we'll do it again. Yes, it's a > pain, but it's better than not having anything release after release. > And having a formal hint language would at least allow us to eventually > clean up some of these oddball cases, like the OFFSET 0 hack. > > I'm also not convinced that even supplimental statistics will be enough > to ensure the planner always does the right thing, so query-level hints > may have to stay (though it'd be great if that wasn't the case). "stay"? I don't think that the general developers of PostgreSQL are going to *accept* anything that stands a significant chance of breaking in one release. You have you challange for the EDB development team: come up with a hinting language which is flexible enough not to do more harm than good (hint: it's not Oracle's hints). -- --Josh Josh Berkus PostgreSQL @ Sun San Francisco
