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

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:18 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> ... I wouldn't object to adding a "total time" field to the
>> machine-readable formats.

> One possibility we discussed previously is to add some decimal places
> to the relevant values when nloops > 1.

Hmm, I must've missed that conversation, but it seems like a possibly
workable compromise.

> If we're going to add a total time field, I think we should add it to
> both the machine-readable and human-readable formats. I know it's a
> little long-winded, but one of the things that I find really
> unfortunate about the current format is that it's sometimes hard to
> look at a plan tree and figure out where "the slow part" is, because
> some things have been divided through by the number of loops. Reading
> through the JSON or YAML format to find the data is, I guess, better
> than nothing, but only slightly: I frequently deal with plans that are
> 25-30 lines long: in XML format, those will be 250-300 lines long. I
> wouldn't mind having to do EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, VERBOSE) or EXPLAIN
> (ANALYZE, some-other-option) to get the details, but EXPLAIN (ANALYZE,
> FORMAT XML) ... is not really a direction I want to go.

I don't really buy this line of reasoning. You don't want to read the
XML format because it's too long, so your solution is to make the text
format longer?

regards, tom lane