Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> writes:
>> treat parentheses around JOIN operations as optimizer hints.
>
> That's a *truly* horrid idea, as sometimes you need them simply to
> get the precedence correct.
You do, but it's been pretty rare in my experience, and we're
considering alternatives which give a lot less flexibility that this.
The *truly* awful thing about the SAP-DB implementation is that it
wasn't optional -- parentheses in this part of a query always limited
optimizer options; I sure wouldn't want to go there again. I thought
we were talking about options for what to do when an enable_* setting
was off for diagnostic purposes....
-Kevin