Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Provide much better wait information in pg_stat_activity.

On 3/10/16 8:36 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> 1. We make it true only for heavyweight lock waits, and false for
> other kinds of waits. That's pretty strange.
> 2. We make it true for all kinds of waits that we now know how to
> report. That still breaks compatibility.

I would absolutely vote for 2 here. You could even argue that it's a bug
fix, since those were waits we technically should have been indicating.

The only way I can see #2 breaking anything is if you're using
waiting=true to determine whether you look at pg_locks and your code
will blow up if you get no rows back, but that seems like a pretty
limited use case to me (Hello, LEFT JOIN).

Dropping the column entirely though would break tons of things.

Another random thought... changes like this would probably be easier to
handle if we provided backwards compatibility extensions that created
views that mimicked the catalog for a specific Postgres version.
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com