Re: Clearing global statistics

Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Actually, that brings up a more general question: what's with the
>> enthusiasm for clearing statistics *at all*?

> ... Right now, you're still carrying around 
> the history of the bad period forever though, and every check of the 
> pg_stat_bgwriter requires manually subtracting the earlier values out.  

Seems like a more appropriate solution would be to make it easier to do
that subtraction, ie, make it easier to capture the values at a given
time point and then get deltas from there.  It's more general (you could
have multiple saved sets of values), and doesn't require superuser
permissions to do, and doesn't have the same potential for
damn-I-wish-I-hadn't-done-that moments.
        regards, tom lane