Re: enforcing a plan (in brief)

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 22:56 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> And the user maintenance of updating those hints for every release of
> PostgreSQL as we improve the database engine.

... and maintaining those hints as the data changes over time.

But I think this thread has been hijacked toward a subject that has been
beaten to death in the past, and away from something that I think might
be worth exploring. IMHO, people deploying PostgreSQL for production use
are just one of the groups of users of this project. Another group are
those people using PostgreSQL in an academic environment. I think it
would be really cool to make it absolutely simple to use PostgreSQL as a
starting point for DBMS research. That would mean things like:

- good, thorough documentation of the internals (naturally this would
help attract OSS developers as well)

- APIs that allow people to drive the planner and executor
programmatically (as in the original question)

- plugin APIs that make it relatively easy to replace the implementation
of a subsystem whole-sale (if there's a cost to these APIs in terms of
complexity or performance, it is perhaps not worth doing)

(Of course, I'm partially guessing here -- but if those people who
actually _are_ using PostgreSQL in an academic context have some
additional ideas for how we can make your lives easier, I'd be curious
to hear them.)

-Neil