This is just a placeholder thread for an open item that I'm adding to the Open Items list. We can make a decision later.
Now that we have Disk-based Hash Aggregation, there are a lot more situations where the planner can choose HashAgg. The enable_hashagg_disk GUC, if set to true, chooses HashAgg based on costing. If false, it only generates a HashAgg path if it thinks it will fit in work_mem, similar to the old behavior (though it wlil now spill to disk if the planner was wrong about it fitting in work_mem). The current default is true. I expect this to be a win in a lot of cases, obviously. But as with any planner change, it will be wrong sometimes. We may want to be conservative and set the default to false depending on the experience during beta. I'm inclined to leave it as true for now though, because that will give us better information upon which to base any decision. Regards, Jeff Davis