Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> > Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> > Would it be possible to make a whole new protocol message for EXPLAIN results?
>
> I'm really unwilling to get into that. For one thing, that would
> absolutely positively break *all* use of EXPLAIN from un-fixed clients,
> whether you were trying to stop early or not.
Well I was picturing still having the manual EXPLAIN ANALYZE which works as it
does now replacing the query results in addition to a lower level protocol
request which generates a protocol response with the data.
> > The reason I'm suggesting that is because it might make it easier to implement
> > the SIGINFO handler that sends incremental EXPLAIN results on demand that I
> > was describing earlier.
>
> Doesn't matter, because that's not happening ;-) SIGINFO isn't
> portable, and even if it were, a signal handler couldn't possibly
> generate EXPLAIN output (remember those catalog accesses).
Well the signal gets handled by psql. It would have to be a wire protocol
message like Query Cancel that the backend watches for and handles the first
time it can.
--
greg