Re: setting for maximum acceptable plan cost?

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 14:45 -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
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> On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:49:27 -0700
> "Jeffrey W. Baker" <jwbaker@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > Nested Loop Left Join  (cost=13920.16..2257575559347.46
> > rows=3691992705807 width=128)
> >
> > After a call to ANALYZE, the same query gave me:
> >
> > Merge Left Join  (cost=16382.02..16853.87 rows=126768 width=59)
> >
> > And runs in 5 seconds.  If I had been able to tell pg to reject any
> > plan with cost over, say 10E9, that would have saved my server from
> > half an hour of nested sequential scans.
>
> I am confused as to why you would want to do that... seems like a
> band aid for lack of maintenance.

Well it's not "maintenance" really since all the inputs are temp tables,
but I do see your point.

Often I have wished for a language which is not SQL which would allow me
to simply specify the whole execution plan.  That would cut out a lot of
ambiguity.

Pie in the sky, I know.

-jwb