Re: machine-readable explain output

On Tuesday 16 June 2009 20:21:21 Tom Lane wrote:
> As a concrete example of what I'm thinking about, I'd hope that PgAdmin
> would be able to display a graphical summary of a plan tree, and then
> pop up measurements associated with one of the nodes when you
> right-click on that node.  To do this, it doesn't necessarily have to
> know all about each specific measurement that a particular backend
> version might emit; but it needs to be able to tell which things are
> measurements.

To do this, you pack all "measurements" into a <measurement> element, and then 
tools are just told to display those.

Really, this isn't much different (or at all different) from designing an 
extensible tree data structure in any programming language.