Re: Understanding EXPLAIN ANALYZE output

Thinking about how to make this analysis faster and less labor-
intensive ...

I know of no other way to get the detailed performance data provided
via EXPLAIN ANALYZE without just painfully disassembling a query.
It seems it would be pretty useful w/r/t performance monitoring to
be able to retrieve such performance numbers as those in EXPLAIN
ANALYZE in a rowset via query. That would seem to enable automated
identification of things like single rows taking 4.63ms to retrieve.
I can think of a number of application queries for which I would
like to do this sort of analysis routinely across a bunch of
database clusters. I guess one could just parse the explain output
in the meantime but, dreaming a bit here, for example,

SELECT node_id, op, parent_node_id, index, relation,
cost_first, cost_last, cost_rows, cost_width,
actual_first, actual_last, actual_rows, actual_loops,
index_condition
FROM pg_explain_analyze('SELECT * FROM foo');

with output similar to

node_id | op | parent_node_id ... actual_last | actual_rows | actual_loops ...
---------+-------------+----------------...--------------+-------------+--------------...
21 | Nested Loop | 20 ... 72.80 | 1014 | 1
22 | Nested Loop | 21 ... 46.51 | 1014 | 1
...
34 | Index Scan | 21 ... 4.63 | 0 | 1014
...

Then, as a routine measure, catch those cases like this one,

SELECT sql, op, index, relation, actual_first
FROM pg_explain_analyze('SELECT * FROM foo')
WHERE op = 'Index Scan'
AND actual_first > 1.0;

Thankfully, I'm sure there are a lot of skilled postgresql'ers
just sitting around right now wishing they had something to do.

Ed