Re: Proposals for EXPLAIN: rename ANALYZE to EXECUTE and extend VERBOSE

On Tue, Nov 5, 2024 at 10:19 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 5, 2024 at 1:02 PM Nikolay Samokhvalov
> <samokhvalov(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > hi, I have a proposal, resulted from numerous communications with
> various folks, both very experienced and new Postgres users:
> >
> > 1) EXPLAIN ANALYZE Is sometimes very confusing (because there is
> ANALYZE). Let's rename it to EXPLAIN EXECUTE?
>
> The trouble is that EXPLAIN EXECUTE already means something.
>
> robert.haas=# explain execute foo;
> ERROR: prepared statement "foo" does not exist
>
> Granted, that would not make it impossible to make EXPLAIN (EXECUTE) a
> synonym for EXPLAIN (ANALYZE), but IMHO it would be pretty confusing
> if EXPLAIN EXECUTE and EXPLAIN (EXECUTE) did different things.
>
> > 2) VERBOSE doesn't include BUFFERS, and doesn't include SETTINGS; it
> might be also confusing sometimes. Let's include them so VERBOSE would be
> really verbose?
>
> I agree that the naming here isn't great, but I think making the
> options non-orthogonal would probably be worse.
>
> > 3) small thing about grammar: allow omitting parentheses, so EXPLAIN
> EXECUTE VERBOSE would work.
>
> Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that this is not a small change. As
> Tom mentions, this would have a pretty large blast radius. In fact,
> the reason I wrote the patch to introduce parenthesized options for
> EXPLAIN was precisely because the unparenthesized option syntax does
> not scale nicely at all.
>

I appreciate all yours and Tom's very quick comments here!

Item 3 is already solved, as it turned out.

Let's focus on item 2. Is it really impossible to make VERBOSE really
verbose?