Re: machine-readable explain output v4

On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 17:11 +0200, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> That will just make things worse. And it will break if the XML includes
> any expression that contains a line break.

Then escape the expressions using CDATA or such... I'm sure it would be
possible to make sure it's one line and rely on that. That's part of
being machine readable, being able to rely on getting it at all without
too much parsing magic...

> I repeat, I want to be able to have a log file that is both machine
> processable and not utterly unreadable by a human. And I do not accept
> at all that this is impossible. Nor do I accept I should need some extra
> processing tool to read the machine processable output without suffering
> brain damage. If we were to adopt your approach I bet you would find
> that nobody in their right mind would use the machine readable formats.

Then why you bother calling it "machine readable" at all ? Would you
really read your auto-explain output on the DB server ? I doubt that's
the common usage scenario, I would expect that most people would let a
tool extract/summarize it and definitely process it somewhere else than
on the DB machine, with the proper tool set. For ad-hoc explain analysis
which I think it's the typical use case for on-the-DB-server inspection
of text-format explain output you would surely use something else than
what is called "machine readable" format...

Cheers,
Csaba.