Re: machine-readable explain output v2

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Andres Freund<andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> I am quite happy that the annoyance over a patch of mine "helped" you starting
> to work on this ;-)
> Thanks for all the work.

You're welcome, thanks for all your reviewing. For the record, I
wasn't annoyed BY the patch; I was annoyed by the inability of the
patch to be applied.

>> > I think it would be nice in the future to add some sort of
>> > 'category={planner,timing,..}' attribute, but I think that should be
>> > discussed/implemented separately.
>> Agree that there are more things to be added.  But I haven't taken the
>> time to figure out exactly what.  One of things I would really like to
>> be able to get is the number of buckets and batches (expected and
>> actual) for a hash join.  Other things I've wished for:
> I think after the patch is committed there should be a big collection of
> wishes so we can see what further infrastructure work is going to be needed...
> Depending on the amount and kind of different options it might not be sufficient
> to simply extent struct Instrumentation/the current instrumentation
> infrastructure...

We'll have to see. The basic options framework is already in, but I
think a more far-ranging discussion should wait until post-CommitFest,
whether explain (format ...) ... is committed by then or not.

>> > Documentation:
>> > I think it would be nice to add some more documentation about the xml
>> > format for application writers, but I think this should be a separate
>> > patch anyway.
>> Suggestions?
> I think extending, correcting and commenting a schema like the one I provided
> sometime ago would be a good start. Anybody wanting to use the output should
> be familiar enough with that...
> I can try to do some of that if somebody goes over my english afterwards...

Happy to copy-edit.

...Robert