On Thursday, Apr 10, 2003, at 00:16 US/Central, Gavin Sherry wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 2003 greg@turnstep.com wrote:
>
>> The screenshots for the "PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition Graphical
>> Tools" look really nice.
>
> They look pretty clean... but do people use these kinds of
> things? Particulraly visual explain. I'm not putting these projects
> down
> -- I'm genuinely interested. Perhaps there will be a greater calling
> for
> them when PostgreSQL native windows port is released.
Visual explain, yes. I definitely use it in Oracle, though maybe I'd be
less likely to do so if plain explain produced semi-readable results
rather than just dumping everything into plan_table in a
non-human-friendly format. But having the GUI tree
(expandable/collapsible) is very helpful for complicated plans. And the
explanation of each type of step is useful if you're inexperienced in
CS algorithms. (What's a merge join? Is it good or bad
performance-wise? There are plenty of database people around who can't
answer that without looking it up.) Oracle's tool shows this in the
lower part of the window whenever you select a step, so looking it up
is already done.
The others...I don't use them much, but my coworkers do. If remembering
the structure of the data dictionary and syntax for DDL commands isn't
your thing, these sorts of tools are nice.
Scott