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Historically we've used a couple of very ad-hoc fudge factors to try to get the right results when indexes of different sizes would satisfy a query with the same number of index leaf tuples being visited. In commit 21a39de5809cd3050a37d2554323cc1d0cbeed9d I tweaked one of these fudge factors, with results that proved disastrous for larger indexes. Commit bf01e34b556ff37982ba2d882db424aa484c0d07 fudged it some more, but still with not a lot of principle behind it. What seems like a better way to address these issues is to explicitly model index-descent costs, since that's what's really at stake when considering diferent indexes with similar leaf-page-level costs. We tried that once long ago, and found that charging random_page_cost per page descended through was way too much, because upper btree levels tend to stay in cache in real-world workloads. However, there's still CPU costs to think about, and the previous fudge factors can be seen as a crude attempt to account for those costs. So this patch replaces those fudge factors with explicit charges for the number of tuple comparisons needed to descend the index tree, plus a small charge per page touched in the descent. The cost multipliers are chosen so that the resulting charges are in the vicinity of the historical (pre-9.2) fudge factors for indexes of up to about a million tuples, while not ballooning unreasonably beyond that, as the old fudge factor did (even more so in 9.2). To make this work accurately for btree indexes, add some code that allows extraction of the known root-page height from a btree. There's no equivalent number readily available for other index types, but we can use the log of the number of index pages as an approximate substitute. This seems like too much of a behavioral change to risk back-patching, but it should improve matters going forward. In 9.2 I'll just revert the fudge-factor change.
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: http://www.postgresql.org/download See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the file HISTORY. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.