> I completely agree that it's much better *in the long run* to improve > the planner and the statistics system so that we don't need hints. But > there's been no plan put forward for how to do that, which means we also > have no idea when some of these problems will be resolved. If someone > comes up with a plan for that, then we can actually look at which options > are better and how soon we can get fixes for these problems in place. > Would it be helpful to have a database of EXPLAIN ANALYZE results and related details that developers could search through? I guess we sort of have that on the mailing list, but search/reporting features on that are pretty limited. Something like the "Report Bug" feature that seems to be growing popular in other software (Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc) might allow collection of useful data. The goal would be to identify the most common problems, and some hints at what's causing them. Maybe have a form based submission so you could ask the user some required questions, ensure that they aren't just submitting EXPLAIN results (parse and look for times maybe?), etc? I guess the general question is, what information could the users provide developers to help with this, and how can it be made easy for the users to submit the information, and easy for the developers to access in a meaningful way? As a developer/contributor, what questions would you want to ask a user?
