On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> It doesn't really seem useful enough to justify breaking client-side
> code that looks at EXPLAIN output.
Fwiw at least pgadmin I don't think would be confused by this. These
tool authors aren't enamoured of fragile assumptions and the
maintenance headaches they cause either.
> This sort of ties into the discussions we have periodically about
> allowing EXPLAIN to output XML or some other more-machine-friendly
> data format. The barrier for adding additional output fields would
> be a lot lower in such a format.
This is still pretty much true if only for the sheer unscalability of
the amount of data being presented for users to sift through. I do
want us to add a ton more instrumentation into the explain plan and
this is only one small addition. If we add number of hard and soft
i/os, time spent in user and system space, etc the result would be
pretty unreadable and they're at least as important as things like
this.
--
greg
