Re: Understanding EXPLAIN ANALYZE output

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 12:06:45AM +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 11:38:47PM +0100, Harald Fuchs wrote:
> > But I think it should be the other way round:  EXPLAIN ANALYZE should
> > return its output in table form, and there should be a function to
> > convert that table into what EXPLAIN ANALYZE outputs now.
>
> I've been wondering about that. A while ago the change was made from
> outputting a NOTICE with the EXPLAIN output to returning a resultset.
> If you could agree on what columns to return it might not be so hard
> for the EXPLAIN to return full tuples...

That does seem cleaner than parsing the EXPLAIN output as we're
playing with right now.  I've been assuming that these experiments
are merely proof of concept and prototypes for how we'd like it to
work.

> Backward compatability is a problem though...

What about making both ways work?  EXPLAIN would format the output
the way it currently looks, and SELECT * FROM explain(...) would
return a resultset.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/