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

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
> Perhaps this is just a terminology difference but it seems
> ridiculously *narrow* to me:

Try "select * from pg_class".

>> Or as I said at the time... nobody liked anything about the patch
>> except that they didn't have to write it.
>
> I know I am often paralyzed by not being certain what the perfect
> choice is and I think the project as a whole suffers from that
> sometime. XML explain output was on the agenda for years but was
> stalled because we weren't sure what XML schema would be useful. And
> we couldn't find out what XML schema would be useful until we had some
> tools trying to use the data....
>
> If pgadmin tries to use the xml data and comes back with some feedback
> will we be able to rejigger the schema? Will pgadmin be happy with a
> different xml schema for each version? I suppose this depends in part
> with how powerful the xml schema parsers are these days, my
> understanding is that they're complex but that doesn't necessarily
> translate into being powerful.

I sort of assumed we might get some feedback from pgadmin or other
tool writers between the time this was committed six months ago and
now, but I haven't seen a single message from anyone who has actually
tried to write a tool. As you imply, I think it will be very hard to
change the format once this is released. At this point I think we may
be stuck with using this format and hoping that it doesn't suck too
badly.

...Robert