Re: [WIP] cache estimates, cache access cost - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: [WIP] cache estimates, cache access cost
Date
Msg-id 4DF79600.7070600@2ndQuadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: [WIP] cache estimates, cache access cost  (Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: [WIP] cache estimates, cache access cost
List pgsql-hackers
On 06/14/2011 11:04 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> Even if the data were accurate and did not cause plan stability, we
> have no evidence that using it will improve real-world performance.
>    

That's the dependency Cédric has provided us a way to finally make 
progress on.  Everyone says there's no evidence that this whole approach 
will improve performance.  But we can't collect such data, to prove or 
disprove it helps, without a proof of concept patch that implements 
*something*.  You may not like the particular way the data is collected 
here, but it's a working implementation that may be useful for some 
people.  I'll take "data collected at ANALYZE time" as a completely 
reasonable way to populate the new structures with realistic enough test 
data to use initially.

Surely at least one other way to populate the statistics, and possibly 
multiple other ways that the user selects, will be needed eventually.  I 
commented a while ago on this thread:  every one of these discussions 
always gets dragged into the details of how the cache statistics data 
will be collected and rejects whatever is suggested as not good enough.  
Until that stops, no progress will ever get made on the higher level 
details.  By its nature, developing toward integrating cached 
percentages is going to lurch forward on both "collecting the cache 
data" and "using the cache knowledge in queries" fronts almost 
independently.  This is not a commit candidate; it's the first useful 
proof of concept step for something we keep talking about but never 
really doing.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us




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