[tacone]

Would love to see a practical example of this.

Another thing to consider is table fragmentation. Fragmentation > bad row count estimation > bad query plan.

[afandian]

We hit some weird query plans. I don't have forensic evidence but here's an example: https://crossref.gitlab.io/engineering/decision-records/dr-0...

Combination of two joins, filtering on all tables, and sorting by the LEFT one. Performance was fine, until we hit the scale when it suddenly became unpredictable.

In hindsight, given the variability of the queries and table structure, I don't think any query planner could have done a good job. The natural answer was to denormalize. But the journey to get there was a little unpredictable.