On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakan...@vmware.com> wrote: > So what I'd actually like to see is \setgaussian, for use in custom scripts.
+1. I'd really like to be able to run a benchmark with a Gaussian and uniform distribution side-by-side for comparative purposes - we need to know that we're not optimizing one at the expense of the other. Sure, DBT-2 gets you a non-uniform distribution, but it has serious baggage from it being a tool primarily intended for measuring the relative performance of different database systems. pgbench would be pretty worthless for measuring the relative strengths and weaknesses of different database systems, but it is not bad at informing the optimization efforts of hackers. pgbench is a defacto standard for that kind of thing, so we should make it incrementally better for that kind of thing. No standard industry benchmark is likely to replace it for this purpose, because such optimizations require relatively narrow focus. Sometimes I want to maximally pessimize the number of FPIs generated. Other times I do not. Getting a sense of how something affects a variety of distributions would be very valuable, not least since normal distributions abound in nature. -- Peter Geoghegan -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers