Re: Statistics Import and Export

On Mon, 2025-02-24 at 12:50 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Also, while working on the attached, I couldn't help forming the
> opinion that we'd be better off to nuke pg_set_attribute_stats()
> from orbit and require people to use pg_restore_attribute_stats().

I had intended the pg_set variants to be useful for ad-hoc stats
hacking (e.g. for reproducing a plan or for testing the optimizer). For
those use cases, the following differences seem nice:

1. named arguments are easier to write ad-hoc than lining up the
parameters in pairs
2. elevel=ERROR makes more sense than WARNING for that kind of use
case.
3. for relation stats, we don't want in-place updates, because you
want ROLLBACK to work

Those seemed different enough from the restore case that another entry
point made sense to me.

> pg_set_attribute_stats() would be fine if we had a way to force
> people to call it with only named-argument notation, but we don't.
> So I'm afraid that its existence will encourage people to rely
> on a specific parameter order, and then they'll whine if we
> add/remove/reorder parameters, as indeed I had to do below.

That's a good point that I hadn't considered, so perhaps we can't solve
problem #1. The other two problems might be solvable though:

* To avoid in-place updates I think we do need a separate function,
at least for relation stats (attribute stats never do in-place
updates). We could potentially have another name/value pair to choose,
but it's impossible to choose a reasonable default: if "inplace" is the
default, that means the user would need to opt-out of it for ROLLBACK
to work; if "mvcc" is the default, that means pg_dump would need to
choose "inplace", and I don't think pg_dump should be making those
kinds of decisions.

* The elevel=ERROR is not terribly important, so perhaps we can just
always do elevel=WARNING. If we did try to present it as an option,
then that presents the same problems as an "inplace" option.

So perhaps we can just have the pg_set variants set elevel=ERROR and
inplace=false, and otherwise be identical to the pg_restore variants?

Regards,
Jeff Davis