Re: Documentation of underlying functions for statistics views

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Josh Kupershmidt <schmiddy@gmail.com> writes:
>> I did find it marginally useful to see clarifications of milliseconds
>> vs. microseconds  (e.g. "block_write_time" column). Yeah, you could
>> figure out that based on the " / 1000" in the view description, but
>> it'd be a bit less obvious. So maybe keep just those?
>
> There's an existing paragraph that explains that the underlying
> functions take backend ID or table/index/function OID.  I was thinking
> of expanding that to add the recommendation to look at the view
> definitions.  We could also add a sentence there that says that for
> timing columns, the underlying function reports integer microseconds
> which are converted to milliseconds by the view.  I think that's better
> than repeating the info for each such column.

Yeah, that sounds fine. The paragraph I think you're talking about
claims "These functions are listed in Table 27-13", but Table 27-13
only has a few functions (e.g. pg_stat_get_db_block_time_read() is
missing). Maybe that paragraph could  clarify that it's talking
generally about all the views/functions on that page.

Josh