Re: enable_resultcache confusion

On Thu, Jul 8, 2021 at 10:29 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 8, 2021 at 12:51 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > Are we going to be forever explaining that enable_resultcache doesn't
> > cache query results?
>
> Yes, I can see that causing ongoing confusion. Naming things is really
> hard...
>
>
I agree that the chosen name is problematic. To borrow existing technical
nomenclature, what we seem to be doing here is adding "Node Memoization"
[1].

"enable_nodememoization" would work for me - by avoiding Result and using
Node the focus should remain without the bowels of the planner's plan and
not move to the output of the query as a whole. "Node Cache" would
probably work just as well if a wholesale change to Memoization doesn't
seem appealing, but the semantics of that term seem closer to what is
happening here.

The description in the commit message suggests we can use this for a wide
variety of nodes so adding any node specific typing to the name seems
unwise.

David J.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization