On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 04:46:04PM -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> I think if we end up breaking compat, we should just drop that
> column.
Indeed.
> Yep, and I think you are all wrong, and that this is just going to cause
> unnecessary pain :). I'm not going to try to prevent the patch from going in
> because of this, just to be clear.
Catalog attributes have faced a lot of renames across the years, with
the same potential of breakages for monitoring tools. I am not saying
that all of them are justified, but we have usually done so because it
makes sense to reshape things in the way they are now, thinking
long-term. Splitting pg_stat_bgwriter into two views does not strike
me as something that bad, TBH, because it becomes clearer which stats
are attached to which process (bgwriter or checkpointer). (Note: I
have not checked in details the stats switching to the new view and
how pertinent each choice is.)
--
Michael