An Overview of pg_plan_advice

Christophe Pettus continues a series on plan hints in Postgres:

Robert Haas’s pg_plan_advice patch set, proposed for PostgreSQL 19, is where the twenty-year argument from Part 2 has landed — or is trying to. It is not pg_hint_plan brought into core. It is a different thing, with different mechanics, a different scope, and a different answer to the “why is this different from Oracle-style hints” question.

Read on to learn more about the proposal and how this resolves some of the core issues that led the major Postgres maintainers to reject query hints for so long.