From: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
> > I had a similar situation, where I had a lot of rows with 0's in
> > them. Changing those to NULLs worked wonders.
>
> Yes, if you have a lot of "dummy" values it's a good idea to represent
> them as NULLs rather than some arbitrarily-chosen regular data value.
> The planner does keep track of NULLs separately from everything else.
Is there a good reason why rdbms don't just keep a cache of decisions on
this stuff. I realise SQL is supposed to be ad-hoc but in reality, it's the
old 90:10 rule where a handful of queries get run consistently and where
performance is important.
Why doesn't PG (or any other system afaik) just have a first guess, run the
query and then if the costs are horribly wrong cache the right result. I'm
guessing there's a bloody good reason (TM) for it since query planning has
got to be equivalent to least-cost path so NP (NP-Complete? I forget - too
long out of college).
- Richard Huxton
