Re: RFC: replace pg_stat_activity.waiting with something more descriptive

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
> Instead of changing the column, can't we add a new one?  Adjusting
> columns in PSA requires the innumerable queries written against it to
> be adjusted along with all the wiki instructions to dev ops for
> emergency stuck query detection etc etc.   I would also prefer to
> query 'waiting' in some cases, especially when in emergency
> situations; it's faster to type.

If people feel strongly about backward compatibility, yes, we can do
that.  However, if waiting continues to mean "on a heavyweight lock"
for backward compatibility, then you could sometimes have waiting =
false but wait_state non-null.  That seems confusing enough to be a
bad plan, at least to me.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company