On Tue, 13 Oct 2009, Robert Haas wrote:
> An exhaustive dump of everything the planner has considered is going to
> be a LOT of data, and I don't really want to have to set up a graphical
> visualization tool every time I have a planning question. I am a
> command-line kind of guy...
Wouldn't this be easy enough to cope with in a scripting language though?
If the planner produces the comprehensive report via something like XML,
that moves the problem of how to best present that into user space, where
I think it belongs at least at first. I'm sure someone can produce an
example program in Perl or Python that produces a fairly collapsed tree
via command line and then allows expanding on bits you want more detail
on. That's the sort of development you can easily get people to do, as
opposed to the dreary details of exporting the detail in the first place.
Get the full report out there, and I'm sure we can produce terse ones in
user-space; once that's nailed down and explored, maybe then it's
appropriate to talk about how to provide squished versions directly. As
already pointed out, some people are never going to be satisfied with
anything other than the most detail possible, so you might as well start
with that if the simpler views can be derived from them.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD