Re: machine-readable explain output v4

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:42:00 -0400
Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> One thing I have noticed that we should talk about is that the
> explain XML output doesn't contain the query that is being explained.
> That's unfortunate - it means that any logfile processor will need to
> extract the statement from the surrounding text rather than just
> pulling out the XML and passing it to an XML processor.

For the purposes I propose using the XML output for, not having the
original query in the XML itself is almost a show stopper. I assume the
original design of this feature had tools in mind that would actually
connect to PostgreSQL directly with commands being issued through the
tool itself.

I would like to create a website where users can paste or upload just
the XML output to and have enough information to do a full analysis of
the query that way.

Ideally this would include the raw query itself, column statistics
targets and ideally even some of the more important query
performance related GUC settings. I realize that could be a lot of
information that may not be needed otherwise, so if its only included
in the VERBOSE explain output, that would be more than fine, but just
having this information available increases the usefulness of such an
"outside" tool many times.

Again though, at the very least I think the raw query needs to be
included.

--
Mike