Re: Reducing output size of nodeToString

On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 at 10:09, Matthias van de Meent
<boekewurm+postgres(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> PFA a patch that reduces the output size of nodeToString by 50%+ in
> most cases (measured on pg_rewrite), which on my system reduces the
> total size of pg_rewrite by 33% to 472KiB. This does keep the textual
> pg_node_tree format alive, but reduces its size significantly.

It would be very cool to have the technology proposed by Andres back
in 2019 [1]. With that, we could easily write various output
functions. One could be compact and easily machine-readable and
another designed to be better for humans for debugging purposes.

We could also easily serialize plans to binary format for copying to
parallel workers rather than converting them to a text-based
serialized format. It would also allow us to do things like serialize
PREPAREd plans into a nicely compact single allocation that we could
just pfree in a single pfree call on DEALLOCATE.

Likely we could just use the existing Perl scripts to form the
metadata arrays rather than the clang parsing stuff Andres used in his
patch.

Anyway, just wanted to ensure you knew about this idea.

David

[1] https://postgr.es/m/flat/20190828234136.fk2ndqtld3onfrrp%40alap3.anarazel.de