Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story?
by 2muchcoffeeman on Sunday June 27, 2021 @05:21AM
(#27649971)
Unfortunately exponential sometimes means “grows rapidly” and not exponential in a mathematical sense.
How? AFAIK a single join can be at most quadratic, and multiple joins should at most be polynomial, where the exponent is the number of joins. To go exponential, you'd need some kind of recursion or self reference, but I know no way to express such a thing as an ordinary join statement.
(of course quadratic performance is already prohibitively slow on large tables, so there is no need to go exponential in order to take "forever")