Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>> That would break code that tries to parse that stuff, eg depesz.com.
> I don't believe Jim was suggesting that we back-patch such a change.
I don't either.
> Changing it in a new major release seems entirely reasonable.
It's still a crock though. I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to
change the nodeBitmap code so that when EXPLAIN ANALYZE is active,
it expends extra effort to try to produce a rowcount number.
We could certainly run through the result bitmap and count the number
of exact-TID bits. I don't see a practical way of doing something
with lossy page bits, but maybe those occur infrequently enough
that we could ignore them? Or we could arbitrarily decide that
a lossy page should be counted as MaxHeapTuplesPerPage, or a bit
less arbitrarily, count it as the relation's average number
of tuples per page.
regards, tom lane