Re: WIP: Upper planner pathification

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> The currently-committed code generates paths where nested loops and
> hash joins get pushed beneath the Gather node, but does not generate
> paths where merge joins have been pushed beneath the Gather node.  And
> the reason I didn't try to generate those paths is because I believe
> they will almost always suck.

That's a perfectly reasonable engineering judgment (and especially so
for a first release).  What I'd really like to see documented is how
that conclusion is related, or not, to the rules about how path nodes
should be decorated with parallel_safe, parallel_degree, etc annotations.
The existing documentation is barely adequate to explain what those fields
mean for primitive scan nodes; it's impossible for anyone but you to
know what they are supposed to mean for joins and higher-level nodes.
        regards, tom lane