Re: Index Tuning Features

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 06:06:09PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Simon Riggs wrote:
> > For 8.3, I'd like to add the following two related features to assist
> > with Index Tuning and usability:
> >
> > - Virtual Indexes
>
> This seems useful, but I'm not sure we need a catalog object for that.
> It might be sufficient to declare these hypothetical indexes within the
> EXPLAIN command. That is after all the only place where they are
> applied.

If you wanted to try multiple scenarios, that might become a pain. I
guess it depends on how verbose the syntax was...

> > - RECOMMEND command
> >
> > Similar in usage to an EXPLAIN, the RECOMMEND command would return a
> > list of indexes that need to be added to get the cheapest plan for a
> > particular query (no explain plan result though).
>
> This functionality also seems useful, but maybe it should be the job of
> a user-space tool?

I think it makes the most sense to have this in core, though I guess an
argument could be made for having it be seperate from the backend. But
it'd have to be easy to call from an external tool, such as pgAdmin,
which means in probably needs to speak libpq.
--
Jim Nasby jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)