Re: Progress indication prototype

On tor, 2010-09-16 at 19:14 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I think that there should be a function which returns just this one
> piece of data and is not automatically called as part of select * from
> pg_stat_activity.  Then we could eventually decide to give backends a
> way to know if that function had been invoked on them and how
> recently.

Displaying this as part of pg_stat_activity is completely trivial: it's
just displaying the value of a float variable.

It seems you are advocating a completely different architecture, where
someone can find out on demand what the progress or status of another
session is, without that other session having known about that request
before it started its current command.  But that seems pretty outlandish
to me, and I would ask for more details on what you have in mind.