Re: Order of views in stats docs

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/monitoring-stats.html, table 27-1.
>> Can somebody find or explain the order of the views in there? It's not
>> actually alphabetical, but it's also not logical. In particular, what
>> is pg_stat_replication doing second to last?
>
>> I would suggest we move pg_stat_replication up to directly under
>> pg_stat_activity, and move pg_stat_database_conflicts up to directly
>> under pg_stat_database. I think the rest makes reasonable sense.
>
>> Any objections to this? Can anybody spot a reason for why they are
>> where they are other than that it was just appended to the end of the
>> table without realizing the order that I'm missing now and am about to
>> break?
>
> I agree that the last two items seem to be suffering from blindly-add-
> it-to-the-end syndrome, which is a disease that runs rampant around here.
>
> However, should we consider the possibility of changing the table to
> straight alphabetical ordering? I'm not as much in love with that
> approach as some folks, but it does have the merit that it's always clear
> where you ought to put a new item. This would result in grouping the
> "all", "sys", and "user" views separately, rather than grouping those
> variants of a view together ... but on reflection I'm not sure that
> that'd be totally horrible.

That would at least make it very predictable, yes.

Another thought I had in that case is maybe we need to break out the
pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_replication views into their own table.
They are really the only two views that are different in a lot of
ways. Maybe call the splits "session statistics views" and "object
statistics views", instead of just "standard statistics views"? The
difference being that they show snapshots of *right now*, whereas all
the other views show accumulated statistics over time.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/