Detoasting optionally to make Explain-Analyze less misleading

Hi,

I have fallen into this trap and others have too. If you run
EXPLAIN(ANALYZE) no de-toasting happens. This makes query-runtimes
differ a lot. The bigger point is that the average user expects more
from EXPLAIN(ANALYZE) than what it provides. This can be suprising. You
can force detoasting during explain with explicit calls to length(), but
that is tedious. Those of us who are forced to work using java stacks,
orms and still store mostly documents fall into this trap sooner or
later. I have already received some good feedback on this one, so this
is an issue that bother quite a few people out there.

Attached is a patch for addressing the issue in form of adding another
parameter to explain. I don't know if that is a good idea, but I got
some feedback that a solution to this problem would be appreciated by
some people out there. It would also be nice to reflect the detoasting
in the "buffers" option of explain as well. The change for detoasting is
only a few lines though.

So the idea was to allow this

EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, DETOAST) SELECT * FROM sometable;

and perform the detoasting step additionally during the explain. This
just gives a more realistic runtime and by playing around with the
parameter and comparing the execution-times of the query one even gets
an impression about the detoasting cost involved in a query. Since the
parameter is purely optional, it would not affect any existing measures.

It is not uncommon that the runtime of explain-analyze is way
unrealistic in the real world, where people use PostgreSQL to store
larger and larger documents inside tables and not using Large-Objects.


Here is a video of the effect (in an exagerated form):
https://www.stepanrutz.com/short_detoast_subtitles.mp4

It would be great to get some feedback on the subject and how to address
this, maybe in totally different ways.

Greetings from cologne, Stepan


Stepan Rutz - IT Consultant, Cologne Germany, stepan.rutz AT gmx.de