Re: Some belated patch review for "Buffers" explain analyze patch

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

> For example, EXPLAIN (VERBOSE, FORMAT JSON) is often ridiculously
> wide because each output list is printed on a single line.

Perhaps this is just a terminology difference but it seems
ridiculously *narrow* to me:
             QUERY PLAN
--------------------------------------[                                   +  {                                 +
"Plan":{                       +      "Node Type": "Seq Scan",      +      "Relation Name": "i",         +
"Schema":"public",           +      "Alias": "i",                 +      "Startup Cost": 0.00,         +      "Total
Cost":63344.86,       +      "Plan Rows": 2399986,         +      "Plan Width": 101,            +      "Actual Startup
Time":0.115, +      "Actual Total Time": 3259.839,+      "Actual Rows": 2400000,       +      "Actual Loops": 1,
   +      "Output": ["i"]               +    },                              +    "Triggers": [                   +
],                             +    "Total Runtime": 5977.303       +  }                                 +]
 
(1 row)


> Or as I said at the time... nobody liked anything about the patch
> except that they didn't have to write it.

I know I am often paralyzed by not being certain what the perfect
choice is and I think the project as a whole suffers from that
sometime. XML explain output was on the agenda for years but was
stalled because we weren't sure what XML schema would be useful. And
we couldn't find out what XML schema would be useful until we had some
tools trying to use the data....

If pgadmin tries to use the xml data and comes back with some feedback
will we be able to rejigger the schema? Will pgadmin be happy with a
different xml schema for each version? I suppose this depends in part
with how powerful the xml schema parsers are these days, my
understanding is that they're complex but that doesn't necessarily
translate into being powerful.


-- 
greg