For the majority of users I'm sure it's sufficient to just have a sample rate.
Anything that's trying to match individual queries could be interested in all sorts of different things. Queries that touch a particular table being one of the more obvious things, or queries that mention a particular literal. Rather than try to design something complicated in advance that anticipates all needs, I'm thinking it makes sense to just throw a hook in there. If some patterns start to emerge in terms of useful real world filtering criteria then that'd better inform any more user accessible design down the track.
same method can be interesting for interactive EXPLAIN ANALYZE too. TIMING has about 20%-30% overhead and usually we don't need a perfectly exact numbers
I don't understand what you are suggesting here.
using some sampling for EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement
Do you mean that you'd like to be able to set a fraction of queries on which auto_explain does ANALYZE, so most of the time it just outputs an ordinary EXPLAIN?
Or maybe we're talking about different things re the original proposal? I don't see how this would work. If you run EXPLAIN ANALYZE interactively like you said above. You'd surely want it to report costs and timings, or whatever it is that you ask for, all the time. Not just some of the time based on some background setting.
Are you advocating a profiling-based approach for EXPLAIN ANALYZE timing where we sample which executor node we're under at regular intervals, instead of timing everything? Or suggesting a way to filter out sub-trees so you only get timing data on some sub-portion of a query?
lot of variants - I would to see cost and times for EXPLAIN ANALYZE every time - but the precision of time can be reduced to 1ms. It is question if we can significantly reduce the cost (or number of calls) of getting system time.