> Looking at ExplainAssembleLogOutput() is making me realize that
> auto_explain is in serious need of some cleanup. That's not really the
> fault of this patch, but the hack whereby we overwrite the [] that
> would have surrounded the JSON output with {} is not very nice. I also
> think that the auto_explain GUCs need rethinking. In theory, new
> EXPLAIN options should be mirrored into auto_explain, but if you
> compare ExplainAssembleLogOutput() to ExplainOnePlan(), you can see
> that they are diverging. The PLANNING, SUMMARY, and SERIALIZE options
> that are known to regular EXPLAIN aren't known to auto_explain, and
> any customizable options that use explain_per_plan_hook won't be able
> to work with auto_explain, either. Changing this is non-trivial
> because SERIALIZE, for example, can't work the same way for
> auto_explain as it does for EXPLAIN, and a full solution might also
> require user-visible changes like replacing
> auto_explain.log_<whatever> with auto_explain.explain, so I don't
> really know. Maybe we should just live with it the way it is for now,
> but it doesn't look very nice.
FWIW, I have been thinking about auto_explain for another task,
remote plans for fdw [0], and perhaps there are now other good
reasons, some that you mention, that can be simplified if "auto_explain"
becomes a core feature. This could be a proposal taken up in 19.
[0]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAP%2BB4TD%3Diy-C2EnsrJgjpwSc7_4pd3Xh-gFzA0bwsw3q8u860g%40mail.gmail.com
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Sami Imseih
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
