PostgreSQL Said No to Query Hints for 20 Years. Postgres 19 Ships Them.
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PostgreSQL 19 shipping query hints after 20 years is a major shift, technically deep and highly relevant to database infrastructure.
Summary
PostgreSQL 19 ships pg_plan_advice, a contrib module that captures and enforces planner decisions via a GUC, not via query comments. It addresses the perennial problem of ANALYZE sampling errors that can silently flip a query to a much slower plan, as documented in a 2026 case where a 99.9996% NULL column caused a plan assuming zero non-null rows. The design avoids traditional objections to hints by keeping advice outside SQL, making it auditable and versionable without touching application code.