Re: Actual Cost

On Feb 16, 2019, at 6:44 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>
> On 2/17/19 3:40 AM, David Fetter wrote:
>>
>> As someone not volunteering to do any of the work, I think it'd be a
>> nice thing to have. How large an effort would you guess it would be
>> to build a proof of concept?
>
> I don't quite understand what is meant by "actual cost metric" and/or
> how is that different from running EXPLAIN ANALYZE.

Here is an example:

Hash Join (cost=3.92..18545.70 rows=34 width=32) (actual cost=3.92..18500 time=209.820..1168.831 rows=47 loops=3)

Now we have the actual time. Time can have a high variance (a change
in system load, or just noises), but I think the actual cost would be
less likely to change due to external factors.

On 2/17/19 3:40 AM, David Fetter wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 03:10:44PM -0800, Donald Dong wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> When explaining a query, I think knowing the actual rows and pages
>> in addition to the operation type (e.g seqscan) would be enough to
>> calculate the actual cost. The actual cost metric could be useful
>> when we want to look into how off is the planner's estimation, and
>> the correlation between time and cost. Would it be a feature worth
>> considering?
>
> As someone not volunteering to do any of the work, I think it'd be a
> nice thing to have. How large an effort would you guess it would be
> to build a proof of concept?

Intuitively it does not feel very complicated to me, but I think the
interface when we're planning (PlannerInfo, RelOptInfo) is different
from the interface when we're explaining a query (QueryDesc). Since
I'm very new, if I'm doing it myself, it would probably take many
iterations to get to the right point. But still, I'm happy to work on
a proof of concept if no one else wants to work on it.

regards,
Donald Dong