Re: Query progress indication - an implementation

On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 18:49 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 14:07 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I think this is pretty much nonsense --- most queries run all their plan
> >> nodes concurrently to some extent. You can't usefully say that a query
> >> is "on" some node, nor measure progress by whether some node is "done".
>
> > The requirement is not nonsense, even if the detail was slightly off.
>
> I was applying the word "nonsense" to the proposed implementation,
> not the desire to have query progress indications ...

Understood, just trying to limit the blast radius.

> > We can regard plans as acting in phases with each blocking node
> > separating the plan. We know which nodes those are, so we can report
> > that.
>
> [ shrug... ] You can regard them that way, but you won't get
> particularly helpful results for a large fraction of real queries.
> The system is generally set up to prefer "streaming" evaluation
> as much as it can. Even in nominally blocking nodes like Sort and Hash,
> there are operational modes that look more like streaming, or at least
> chunking.

It's not always useful, though many large queries do have multiple
phases. The concept and the name come from ETL tools and it is of real
practical use in those environments. We can put the phase number on the
EXPLAIN easily, and it is very simple to calculate the total number of
phases and the current phase - e.g. 2 of 5 phases complete.

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com
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