Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Can we forcibly discard it if *any* messages are received that might > invalidate a plan? So basically it would work fine unless anyone in the system > does any DDL at all? I guess that has the downside of introducing random > unpredictable failures.
Ugh :-( > Or stash the query string and replan it (possibly in the query cache this > time) if someone executes it a second time? I think that's either my plan A or C. The main problem with uncontrolled replanning is that there's no way to detect a change in the query properties. For example suppose the query is "SELECT * FROM foo" and we've already told the client (via Describe Statement) that that returns two integer columns. If an inval now arrives because of "ALTER TABLE foo ADD COLUMN" (or perhaps worse, ALTER COLUMN TYPE), we've got a problem. If we just blindly replan then we'll return tuples that do not match the previously given row description, which will certainly break most clients. The plan caching module has enough infrastructure to detect and complain about these sorts of situations, and it also knows how to manage lock acquisition so that once we've decided a plan is still good, the tables won't change underneath us while we use the plan. I don't see any way to make comparable guarantees without the overhead that goes with the cache manager. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster