Re: generic options for explain

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[Sent by mistake to Robert Haas only at first try. No cure for fat
fingers, I guess]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 04:05:18PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:

[...]

> I think XML output format is a complete distraction from the real
> issue here, which is that there are certain pieces of information that
> are sometimes useful but are not useful enough to justify including
> them in the EXPLAIN output 100% of the time. By just punting all that
> stuff to EXPLAIN XML, we're just saying that we're not interested in
> creating a workable set of options to allow users to pick and choose
> the information they care about - so instead we're going to dump a
> huge chunk of unreadable XML and then make it the user's problem to
> find a tool that will extract the details that they care about. Boo,
> hiss.

+1

In my experience, this happens with "XML the data description language"
many times, but I haven' seen the problem as well-stated as in your
mail.

Hard for humans to read, hard for machines to read, and often trying to
solve a problem it can't (in this case, selecting the needed information
_beforehand_).

Regards
- -- tomás
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