Re: EXPLAIN omits schema?

On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 14:01 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> > Arguably this is a bug if it's causing pg_admin difficulties in parsing the
> > output. Even for a user in an environment where, for example, he has several
> > identical schemas and may be accidentally getting a different table than he's
> > expecting the current output is ambiguous.
>
> > Attached is a small patch which adds this conditionally on a guc that
> > pg_admin or other GUI tools could set, leaving it unchanged for users.
>
> That makes things *worse* not better, since now tools would have to
> deal with both possibilities.

The context here was a new feature in PgAdmin, which needs to be able to
parse the SQL *and* find out the schema of a table.

The idea was to have a tool that would issue an EXPLAIN *and* collect
all the other relevant details required to submit an optimizer question
to the lists. The tool would then be able to check for simple things
like not having run ANALYZE.

That feature would be very useful in identifying optimizer issues, as
well as filtering out many requests that arrive, only to be easily
explainable. Greg's small patch will allow this useful utility to be
available for use with the 8.3 release package, so I hope you'll
reconsider.

Of course, XML output can be done for the next release.

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