Re: That EXPLAIN ANALYZE patch still needs work

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 10:56 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > I propose we revert the sampling patch (sorry Martijn)
>
> yah ...
>
> > and go with the
> > patch to have an explain_analyze_timing parameter (default=on).
>
> This I'm unexcited about. EXPLAIN output isn't all that transparent
> anyway, and losing the extra cue of seeing where the time is really
> going would make it extremely easy for people to misinterpret their
> problems.

As before, agreed, but it works and is available now.

> I was intending to push forward with the idea of being able to get
> numbers out of a canceled EXPLAIN. That will allow you to get some
> information even when the underlying query runs longer than you're
> willing to tolerate. I still say that the number of queries where
> avoiding gettimeofday overhead would transform an intolerable runtime
> into a tolerable one is pretty limited.

That would be a good feature to have.

> The other thing that I think would be worth investigating is
> timer-driven sampling, although it's not yet clear whether we can
> make that work usefully. Anyone want to take up that project?

Not me, sorry.

--
Simon Riggs
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com