Re: Statistics Import and Export

On Mon, 2025-01-20 at 16:45 -0500, Corey Huinker wrote:
>
> What I struggle to understand is how that purpose isn't served better
> by statistics being in SECTION_NONE like COMMENTs are, so that they
> are imported immediately after the object that they reference.

Tom, you expressed the strongest opinions on this point, can you expand
a bit?

If I understand correctly:

* We strongly want stats to be exported by default[1].

* Adding a SECTION_STATS could work, but would be non-trivial and might
break expectations about the set of sections available[2].

* SECTION_NONE doesn't seem right. There would be no way to get the
stats using --section. Also, if there is no section boundary for the
stats, then couldn't they appear in a surprising order?

* I'm not sure about placing stats in SECTION_POST_DATA. That doesn't
seem terrible to me, but not great either.

* I'm also not 100% sure about the flags. The default should dump the
stats, of course. And I like the idea of allowing any combination of
schema, data and stats to be exported. But that leaves a wrinkle for --
data-only, which (as of v38) does not dump stats, because stats are a
third kind of thing. Perhaps stats should be expressed as a subtype of
data somehow, but I'm not sure exactly how.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

[1]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3228677.1713844341%40sss.pgh.pa.us

[2]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3156140.1713817153%40sss.pgh.pa.us