Re: Documentation of underlying functions for statistics views

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 2:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Currently, some of the per-column entries in monitoring.sgml mention the
> underlying stats function; but the coverage is incomplete, and it seems
> very cluttering anyway.  I propose that we remove all that and instead
> just suggest that people examine the definition of the view if they want
> to know the names of the underlying functions.

I agree that most of the plain descriptions like:

| This value can also be returned by directly calling the
| pg_stat_get_db_blocks_hit function.

are pretty worthless, because you can trivially figure that out the
function name from the view definition, and there's not any other
useful information in that snippet. And you'd have to do some futzing
to figure out the right inputs to the function if you wanted to call
it directly, anyway.

I did find it marginally useful to see clarifications of milliseconds
vs. microseconds (e.g. "block_write_time" column). Yeah, you could
figure out that based on the " / 1000" in the view description, but
it'd be a bit less obvious. So maybe keep just those?

Josh