Re: table size growing out of control

Jan Wieck <JanWieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Good point. What do people think of making the pg_stat_activity view do
>> COALESCE(current_query, '<unknown>')
>> so that there's a clear flag that you're not seeing anything?

> Shouldn't be done on the view. The builtin function used to extract that
> information from the stats file can do it much better.

No, I think the view is exactly the right place to do it. If we do it
in the function then we are forcing a UI-prettiness issue onto
applications that may not want it; but they'll have no way to bypass it.

> So it could return <permission denied> or similar in that case to
> distinguish.

I don't think it's all that important to distinguish the reason why
you're not seeing it. Returning NULL from the function is a perfectly
good convention at the level of the function.

regards, tom lane