Tom Lane wrote:
>
> Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Good point. What do people think of making the pg_stat_activity view do
> >> COALESCE(current_query, '<unknown>')
> >> so that there's a clear flag that you're not seeing anything?
>
> > Shouldn't be done on the view. The builtin function used to extract that
> > information from the stats file can do it much better.
>
> No, I think the view is exactly the right place to do it. If we do it
> in the function then we are forcing a UI-prettiness issue onto
> applications that may not want it; but they'll have no way to bypass it.
>
> > So it could return <permission denied> or similar in that case to
> > distinguish.
>
> I don't think it's all that important to distinguish the reason why
> you're not seeing it. Returning NULL from the function is a perfectly
> good convention at the level of the function.
Could you then please explain why you want to change anything at all?
Doesn't NULL perfectly express "unknown", at least if it's in the result
set of an ANSI compliant database?
Jan
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