Re: Plan stability versus near-exact ties in cost estimates - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Plan stability versus near-exact ties in cost estimates
Date
Msg-id 8410.1334937513@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Plan stability versus near-exact ties in cost estimates  (Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>)
List pgsql-hackers
Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>> A variant idea would be to replace the exact cost comparison with a
>> second round of fuzzy cost comparison, but with a much tighter fuzz
>> factor, maybe 1e-6 instead of 0.01.

> Not impressed with this idea- the notion that our model is good enough
> to produce valid values out to that many digits is, well, unlikely.

> I haev to disagree about users noticing this and complaining about it
> too, to be honest, that strikes me as very unlikely..  For starters,
> they'd have to be debugging the planner sufficiently to see that there
> are two nearly-identical plans under consideration and that we picked
> one over the other based on which came first..

Yeah, I'm pretty dubious about that too.  If there is really a reason
to care which one gets picked, it must be that the actual difference in
cost is much more than 1%.  In which case, the appropriate fix is in the
cost estimates, not in the details of how add_path resolves near-ties.
        regards, tom lane


pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Tom Lane
Date:
Subject: Re: Plan stability versus near-exact ties in cost estimates
Next
From: Tom Lane
Date:
Subject: Re: Plan stability versus near-exact ties in cost estimates