Re: Disabling options lowers the estimated cost of a query

Arne Roland <A(dot)Roland(at)index(dot)de> writes:
> I want to examine the exhaustive search and not the geqo here. I'd expect the exhaustive search to give the plan with the lowest cost, but apparently it doesn't. I have found a few dozen different querys where that isn't the case. I attached one straight forward example. For the join of two partitions a row first approach would have been reasonable.

Hmm. While the search should be exhaustive, there are pretty aggressive
pruning heuristics (mostly in and around add_path()) that can cause us to
drop paths that don't seem to be enough better than other alternatives.
I suspect that the seqscan plan may have beaten out the other one at
some earlier stage that didn't think that the startup-cost advantage
was sufficient reason to keep it.

It's also possible that you've found a bug. I notice that both
plans are using incremental sort, which has been, um, rather buggy.
Hard to tell without a concrete test case to poke at.

regards, tom lane