Re: BASH script for collecting analyze-related info

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:39 AM, John Melesky
<john(dot)melesky(at)rentrakmail(dot)com>wrote:

> (off-list)
>
(on-list)

> I doubt I'm the first to ask, but have you considered putting this up on
> github (or similar) so others can contribute more easily and keep it
> up-to-date?
>
> If that's not in the cards, are you opposed to someone else putting it up
> on github and taking over management of it?
>
> -john
>
>
Actually, you definitely were the first to ask. I'm not opposed to any
combination of putting this on github, continuing to work on this script,
or having someone else do it. But before doing so (or to start), let me
throw out a few questions:

First and foremost (and primarily directed to people who are kind enough to
provide help on this list), is a script like this worthwhile? Will it help
get better problem reports and save back-and-forth time of "please post x,
y and z?" If not, I don't see the point of pursuing this.

If it is worthwhile, what's the best way of going about getting the
necessary information? Parsing the contents of EXPLAIN output that wasn't
designed for this purpose seems doable, but clunky at best. And it doesn't
tell you which views are involved.

In an ideal situation, I'd see this being built into postgres, so that you
could do something like EXPLAIN [ANALYZE] *DESCRIBE ...*, and get your
descriptions directly as part of the output. If that is pure fantasy, is
there any way to directly identify all the tables, views and indexes that
are involved in a query plan?

If no to the above, then parsing the analyze output seems the only option.
I was pondering what language a script to do this should be written in,
and I'm thinking that writing it in pgpsql might be the best option, since
it would be the most portable and presumably available on all systems. I
haven't fully thought that through, so I'm wondering if anyone sees reasons
that wouldn't work, or if some other language would be a better or more
natural choice.

Cheers,
Ken

--
AGENCY Software
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ken(dot)tanzer(at)agency-software(dot)org
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