Re: Adjusting debug_print_plan to be more useful by default

On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 12:40 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Back in April we changed EXPLAIN VERBOSE to not dump the internal plan
> tree anymore, on the grounds that non-hackers didn't want that info and
> hackers could get it with debug_print_plan and related variables.
> Well, now that I've tried to do some planner development work relying on
> debug_print_plan instead of EXPLAIN VERBOSE, I find it a mite annoying.
> It's not sufficient to set debug_print_plan = true, because the output
> comes out at priority DEBUG1, which is to say it doesn't come out at all
> in a default configuration. If you boost up client_min_messages or
> log_min_messages so you can see it, you get lots of extraneous debugging
> messages too.
>
> I'd like to propose that the messages emitted by debug_print_plan
> and friends be given priority LOG rather than DEBUG1. If you've gone
> to the trouble of turning on the variable, then you presumably want the
> results, so it seems dumb to print them at a priority that isn't logged
> by default. (Note that this is biased to the assumption that you want
> the messages in the postmaster log, not on the console. Which is
> usually what I want, but maybe someone wants to argue for NOTICE?)

what about changing (or adding) values "log" and "notice" ?

debug_print_plan = log;

debug_print_plan = notice;

so you could set that on demand ?

> I'd also like to propose making debug_pretty_print default to ON.
> At least for me, the other formatting is 100% unreadable.
>
> Comments?
>
> regards, tom lane
>