Whether somebody think it's bad or not, but sometime it's very interesting to be able to control planner (provide hints, which tell optimizer to ignore its algorithm in part), which is currently impossible in Postgres Pro (and PostgreSQL). Oracle, for example, has over 120 hints, and Microsoft SQL Server also supports hints.

This first version of plantuner provides a possibility to hide specified indexes from Postgres Pro planner, so it will not use them.

There are many situations when developer want to temporarily disable specific index(es), without dropping them, or to instruct planner to use specific index.

Next, for some workload Postgres Pro could be too pessimistic for newly created tables and assumes much more rows in table than it actually has. If plantuner.fix_empty_table GUC variable is set to true then module will set to zero the number of pages/tuples of table which hasn't blocks in a file.

plantuner.disable_index — List of indexes invisible to planner

plantuner.enable_index — List of indexes visible to planner even they are hidden by plantuner.disable_index.

To enable the module you can either load shared library 'plantuner' in psql session or specify 'shared_preload_libraries' option in postgresql.conf.

=# LOAD 'plantuner';
=# create table test(id int);
=# create index id_idx on test(id);
=# create index id_idx2 on test(id);
=# \d test
     Table "public.test"
 Column |  Type   | Modifiers
--------+---------+-----------
 id     | integer |
Indexes:
    "id_idx" btree (id)
    "id_idx2" btree (id)
=# explain select id from test where id=1;
                              QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Bitmap Heap Scan on test  (cost=4.34..15.03 rows=12 width=4)
   Recheck Cond: (id = 1)
   ->  Bitmap Index Scan on id_idx2  (cost=0.00..4.34 rows=12 width=0)
         Index Cond: (id = 1)
(4 rows)
=# set enable_seqscan=off;
=# set plantuner.disable_index='id_idx2';
=# explain select id from test where id=1;
                              QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Bitmap Heap Scan on test  (cost=4.34..15.03 rows=12 width=4)
   Recheck Cond: (id = 1)
   ->  Bitmap Index Scan on id_idx  (cost=0.00..4.34 rows=12 width=0)
         Index Cond: (id = 1)
(4 rows)
=# set plantuner.disable_index='id_idx2,id_idx';
=# explain select id from test where id=1;
                               QUERY PLAN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on test  (cost=10000000000.00..10000000040.00 rows=12 width=4)
   Filter: (id = 1)
(2 rows)
=# set plantuner.enable_index='id_idx';
=# explain select id from test where id=1;
                              QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Bitmap Heap Scan on test  (cost=4.34..15.03 rows=12 width=4)
   Recheck Cond: (id = 1)
   ->  Bitmap Index Scan on id_idx  (cost=0.00..4.34 rows=12 width=0)
         Index Cond: (id = 1)
(4 rows)
      

All work was done by Teodor Sigaev ([email protected]) and Oleg Bartunov ([email protected]).

The work sponsored by Nomao project (http://www.nomao.com).