Re: BASH script for collecting analyze-related info - Mailing list pgsql-performance

(on-list)

 

Actually, you definitely were the first to ask.  I'm not opposed to any combination of putting this on github, continuing to work on this script, or having someone else do it.  But before doing so (or to start), let me throw out a few questions:

First and foremost (and primarily directed to people who are kind enough to provide help on this list), is a script like this worthwhile?  Will it help get better problem reports and save back-and-forth time of "please post x, y and z?"  If not, I don't see the point of pursuing this.

If it is worthwhile, what's the best way of going about getting the necessary information?  Parsing the contents of EXPLAIN output that wasn't designed for this purpose seems doable, but clunky at best.  And it doesn't tell you which views are involved.

In an ideal situation, I'd see this being built into postgres, so that you could do something like EXPLAIN [ANALYZE] DESCRIBE ..., and get your descriptions directly as part of the output.  If that is pure fantasy, is there any way to directly identify all the tables, views and indexes that are involved in a query plan?

If no to the above, then parsing the analyze output seems the only option.  I was pondering what language a script to do this should be written in, and I'm thinking that writing it in pgpsql might be the best option, since it would be the most portable and presumably available on all systems.  I haven't fully thought that through, so I'm wondering if anyone sees reasons that wouldn't work, or if some other language would be a better or more natural choice.

Cheers,

Ken