Proposal: relaxing link between explicit JOINs and execution order

There's been some recent discussion about the fact that Postgres treats
explicit JOIN syntax as constraining the actual join plan, cf
http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.3/postgres/explicit-joins.html

This behavior was originally in there simply because of lack of time to
consider alternatives. I now realize that it wouldn't be hard to get
the planner to do better --- basically, preprocess_jointree just has to
be willing to fold JoinExpr-under-JoinExpr into a FromExpr when the
joins are inner joins.

But in the meantime, some folks have found the present behavior to be
a feature rather than a bug, since it lets them control planning time
on many-table queries. If we are going to change it, I think we need
some way to accommodate both camps.

What I've been toying with is inventing a GUC variable or two. I am
thinking of defining a variable that sets the maximum size of a FromExpr
that preprocess_jointree is allowed to create by folding JoinExprs.
If this were set to 2, the behavior would be the same as before: no
collapsing of JoinExprs can occur. If it were set to a large number,
inner JOIN syntax would never affect the planner at all. In practice
it'd be smart to leave it at some value less than GEQO_THRESHOLD, so
that folding a large number of JOINs wouldn't leave you with a query
that takes a long time to plan or produces unpredictable plans.

There is already a need for a GUC variable to control the existing
behavior of preprocess_jointree: right now, it arbitrarily uses
GEQO_THRESHOLD/2 as the limit for the size of a FromExpr that can be
made by collapsing FromExprs together. This ought to be a separately
settable parameter, I think.

Comments? In particular, can anyone think of pithy names for these
variables? The best I'd been able to come up with is MAX_JOIN_COLLAPSE
and MAX_FROM_COLLAPSE, but neither of these exactly sing...

regards, tom lane