Re: contrib/pg_stat_statements 1202

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Vladimir Sitnikov wrote:

>> Oracle's approach is to have the explain command stuff the results into a
>> table. That has advantages for tools, especially if you want to be able to
>> look at plans generated by other sessions.
>
> I do not believe that workflow makes sense. I have never ever thought of it.

The main benefit is that you can track how EXPLAIN plans change over time.
Archive a snapshot of what the plans for all your common queries look like
every day, and the day one of them blows up and starts doing something
wrong you've got a *lot* more information to work with for figuring out
what happened--whether it was a minor query change, some stats that got
slowly out of whack, etc. I wouldn't just immediately dismiss that
workflow as unsensible without thinking about it a bit first, there are
some good advantages to it.

Greg Sabino Mullane had a neat blog entry on saving plans to tables in
PostgreSQL, unfortunately the Planet PostgreSQL outage seems to have eaten
it.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD