Re: JIT performance bug/regression & JIT EXPLAIN - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 4:18 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> >>> I do not think that the readability-vs-usefulness tradeoff is going
> >>> to be all that good there, anyway.  Certainly for testing purposes
> >>> it's going to be more useful to examine portions of a structured output.
>
> > I intensely dislike having information that we can't show in the text
> > format, or really, that we can't show in every format.
>
> Well, if it's relegated to a "jit = detail" option or some such,
> the readability objection could be overcome.  But I'm still not clear
> on how you'd physically wedge it into the output, at least not in a way
> that matches up with the proposal that non-text modes handle this stuff
> by producing sub-nodes for the existing types of expression fields.

Well, remember that the text format was the original format. The whole
idea of "groups" was an anachronism that I imposed on the text format
to make it possible to add other formats. It wasn't entirely natural,
because the text format basically indicated nesting by indentation,
and that wasn't going to work for XML or JSON. The text format also
felt free to repeat elements and assume the reader would figure it
out; repeating elements is OK in XML in general, but in JSON it's only
OK if the surrounding context is an array rather than an object.
Anyway, the point is that I (necessarily) started with whatever we had
and found a way to fit it into a structure. It seems like it ought to
be possible to go the other direction also, and figure out how to make
the structured data look OK as text.

Here's Andres's original example:

"Filter": {
  "Expr": "(lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone)",
  "JIT-Expr": "evalexpr_0_2",
  "JIT-Deform-Scan": "deform_0_3",
  "JIT-Deform-Outer": null,
  "JIT-Deform-Inner": null
}

Right now we show:

Filter: (lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone)

Andres proposed:

Filter: (lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone); JIT-Expr: evalexpr_0_2, JIT-Deform-Scan:
deform_0_3

That's not ideal because it's all on one line, but that could be changed:

Filter: (lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone)
  JIT-Expr: evalexpr_0_2
  JIT-Deform-Scan: deform_0_3

I would propose either including null all the time or omitting it all
the time, so that we would either change the JSON output to...

"Filter": {
  "Expr": "(lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone)",
  "JIT-Expr": "evalexpr_0_2",
  "JIT-Deform-Scan": "deform_0_3"
}

Or the text output to:

Filter: (lineitem.l_shipdate <= '1998-09-18 00:00:00'::timestamp
without time zone)
  JIT-Expr: evalexpr_0_2
  JIT-Deform-Scan: deform_0_3
  JIT-Deform-Outer: null
  JIT-Deform-Inner: null

You could argue that this is inconsistent because the JSON format
shows a bunch of keys that are essentially parallel, and this text
format makes the Expr key essentially the primary value and the others
secondary. But since the text format is for human beings, and since
human beings are likely to find the Expr key to be the primary piece
of information, maybe that's totally fine.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company