Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> writes:
> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
>> Actually, I've been wondering about better ways to handle this. One
>> thought is to come up with a non-human readable format that could easily
>> be cut and pasted into a website that would then provide something easy
>> to understand. Ideally that website could also produce graphical output
>> like pgAdmin does, since that makes it trivially easy to see what the
>> 'critical path' is.
> I actually started putting something like this together about a year
> ago, but the majority of my time was spent reformatting the text rather
> than reading the explain.
I dislike the thought of encouraging people to post stuff in a
not-easily-readable format. They won't do it anyway, if it's not
default; look how we still can't get people to send EXPLAIN ANALYZE
output the first time.
One idea that comes to mind is to work up some trivial little script
that undoes the more common forms of cut-and-paste damage.
I wonder if it would help much just to change EXPLAIN to indent with
something other than spaces? Maybe instead of
Nested Loop (cost=1.06..40.43 rows=5 width=244) Join Filter: (public.tenk1.unique2 = int4_tbl.f1) -> HashAggregate
(cost=1.06..1.11rows=5 width=4)
print
Nested Loop (cost=1.06..40.43 rows=5 width=244)
--Join Filter: (public.tenk1.unique2 = int4_tbl.f1)
----> HashAggregate (cost=1.06..1.11 rows=5 width=4)
Not sure what would look nice, but this would at least remove the hazard
from stuff that thinks whitespace isn't significant.
regards, tom lane