On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
> That alone could improve things considerably, and statistical info could be > propagated along expressions to make it possible to model uncertainty in > complex expressions as well.
But how would that work? I see no solution adumbrated there :-).
I would have to tipify the SQL expression grammar for this, but I don't think it would be impossible. Most non-function expression nodes seem rather trivial. Even CASE, as long as you have a distribution for the conditional, you can derive a distribution for the whole. User defined functions would be another game, though. Correlation would have to be measured, and that can be troublesome and a weak spot of risk computation as much as it is of planning, but it could be fuzzed arbitrarily until properly computed - after all, dependency on correlation or non-correlation is a known source of risk, and accounting for it in any way is better than not.
Let's say you change the rowcount estimate to low/bestguess/high *and* you only engage extra searches when there is enough disparity between those values you still get exponentially more searches.
I was under the impression the planner already did an exhaustive search for some queries. So it's just a matter of picking the best plan among those (ie: estimating cost). The case of GEQO isn't any different, except perhaps introducing a risk-decreasing transformation would be needed, unless I'm missing something.
(my thinking is that if bestguess estimated execution time is some user definable amount faster then low/high at any node), a more skeptical plan is introduced. All that could end up being pessimal to the general case though.
I think the cost estimate would be replaced by a distribution (simplified perhaps into an array of moments, or whatever is easily manipulated in the face of complex expressions). What the user would pick, is a sampling method of said distribution. Then, plans get measured by the user's stick (say: arithmetic mean, median, 90th percentile, etc). The arithmetic mean would I guess be the default, and that ought to be roughly equivalent to the planner's current behavior.