On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 1:35 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
But that all seems like a separate question from why we have the statistic collector views in a completely different part of the documentation from the rest of the system views. My guess is that it's just kind of a historical accident, but maybe there was some other logic to it.
The details under-pinning the cumulative statistics subsystem are definitely large enough to warrant their own subsection. And it isn't like placing them into the monitoring chapter is wrong and aside from a couple of views those under System Views don't fit into what we've defined as monitoring. I don't have any desire to lump them under the generic system views; which itself could probably use a level of categorization since the nature of pg_locks and pg_cursors is decidedly different than pg_indexes and pg_config. This all becomes more appealing to work on once we solve the problem of all sect2 entries being placed on a single page.
I struggled for a long while where I'd always look for pg_stat_activity under system views instead of monitoring. Amending my prior suggestion in light of this I would suggest we move the Cumulative Statistics Views into Reference but as its own Chapter, not part of System Views, and change its name to "Monitoring Views" (going more generalized here feels like a win to me). I'd move pg_locks, pg_cursors, pg_backend_memory_contexts, pg_prepared_*, pg_shmem_allocations, and pg_replication_*. Those all have the same general monitoring nature to them compared to the others that basically provide details regarding schema and static or session configuration.
The original server admin monitoring section can go into detail regarding Cumulative Statistics versus other kinds of monitoring. We can use section ordering to fulfill logical grouping desires until we are able to make section3 entries appear on their own pages.