On 24 May 2002 at 10:28, Jim Starkey wrote:

> At 08:54 AM 5/24/02 -0400, Paul Schmidt wrote:
> >
> >Did the person that wrote the changes manage to comment and
> compartmentalize
> >what they did, or is this something that pollutes the entire
> >optimizer
> code? In other
> >words does anyone know if this is simple surgery or will we need to
> >kill
> the patient in
> >the process.
> >
>
> I really haven't been in there in any depth for about a decade,
> but I would be very surprised if the person who screwed it up
> bothered to understand it himself.

Probably the age old problem of the Marketing guys want to ship the upgrade last
month, and the programmer was handed it on a Friday afternoon, most likely before
a long weekend, and couldn't go home until it was done. So rather then taking time
to look at the code, he ( or she) simply hacked in what they were told, and ran a
compile, 0 errors and only 32546 warnings, perfect, ship it.

> Finding the problem should be extremely simple. Take a relatively
> simple case of optimizer screw-up and find why it screwed-up. Until
> version 4, it worked like a charm. Hint: problem is likely to be in
> the area where it considers index walking rather than scanning.

I wouldn't mind looking at the optimizer to see what it does, and how it does it.
Anybody know which module it is, I don't have the bandwidth to download the whole
tree....

Paul Schmidt, President
Tricat Technologies
paul@...
www.tricattechnologies.com