Re: Optional skipping of unchanged relations during ANALYZE?

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for the detailed and thoughtful feedback. I want to confirm my
understanding of the points raised and how I plan to align the work going
forward.

On the implementation details raised by Ilia:
I agree that the current flag definition and placement need correction. The
MISSING_STATS option must use a unique flag value, and the check should be
performed only after the standard relation validation, privilege checks,
and existing skip conditions in analyze_rel(). I will fix both and verify
the behavior with assertions enabled.

Regarding behavior and scope, I understand the concern that the current v3
implementation does not exactly match vacuumdb --missing-stats-only
semantics. My intent was not to claim behavioral equivalence, but to expose
a server-side ANALYZE option that identifies relations requiring statistics
collection. I agree that this distinction needs to be made clearer.

The suggestion to reuse existing ANALYZE internals, in particular
examine_attribute(), makes sense. Leveraging that logic to determine
whether analyzable attributes lack statistics should align the
implementation more closely with core ANALYZE behavior and avoid
re-defining missing-stats rules independently.[Thanks Sami for teaching me
this as i am an new contributor:) ]

On vacuumdb integration: I agree that this patch should focus only on
defining server-side ANALYZE semantics. As noted, vacuumdb is a client tool
that must handle multiple server versions, and the definition of “missing
stats” itself is evolving (especially for extended and expression
statistics). Adapting vacuumdb to use ANALYZE(MISSING_STATS_ONLY) can be
considered as follow-up work once the server-side behavior is finalized.

Finally, I agree that the option name should be MISSING_STATS_ONLY for
clarity and consistency with vacuumdb.

Thanks again for the guidance — it has been very helpful in understanding
the expected direction and design constraints. I will post an updated patch
addressing the above points.

*Vasuki MC-DAC,Chennai*