Re: Some belated patch review for "Buffers" explain analyze patch

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:59 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Yes.  We could add every bell and whistle imaginable to the text
> format and it still would not begin to approach the verbosity of the
> machine-readable formats.  Have you looked at them on a complex plan?
> They are really, really long, and in many cases quite unreadable by
> human beings.

Well I complained about that at the time. At least for XML that's
becuase you chose to make separate tags on separate lines for every
single value instead of just having one tag for estimates, one for
actual, and using attributes for the different values.

Incidentally my patch to use getrusage also reraises the other issue I
complained about. There's no organization to the tags so a tool to
view them can't make heads or tails of them without knowing in advance
what they all are. For example pgadmin can't make a tree with
expandable subtrees for each data source since it doesn't know which
attributes are related to which unless it hard codes knowledge about
them.

Tom pointedly ignored the getrusage thing -- presumably because it's
well past the time to consider new patches. But I didn't post the
example to discuss it, I posted it because I think it can inform these
earlier decisions. Ie, seeing that data might make it clearer which
things we want to be per-loop and which we want totals for. And
knowing that we'll likely have a place to hang the total wall clock
time if we want might make the decision easier.

--
greg