Re: EXPLAIN omits schema?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> Once you have an XML plan what can you do with it? All you can do is parse it
>> into constituent bits and display it. You cant do any sort of comparison
>> between plans, aggregate results, search for plans matching constraints, etc.
>
> Sure you can, just not in SQL ;-)
>
> Given the amount of trouble we'd have to go to to put the data into a
> pure SQL format, I don't think that's exactly an ideal answer either.
> I'm for making the raw EXPLAIN output be in a simple and robust format,
> which people can then postprocess however they want --- including
> forcing it into SQL if that's what they want. But just because we're a
> SQL database doesn't mean we should think SQL is the best answer to
> every problem.
>
> While I'm surely not an XML fanboy, it looks better suited to this
> problem than a pure relational representation would be.

If we are looking into such a format we could even think a bit about
including basic plan-influencing information like work_mem, enable_*
settings, effective_cache_size,.. there too ...

Stefan