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
