Qingqing Zhou <zhouqq.postg...@gmail.com> writes: > There are still something bothering me: EXPLAIN is a mixed output with > original text, rows for RelOptInfo, rows for Paths and possible others > added later. So we have to use 't as text' to receive each line. To do the > insertion, we have to further decompose each text line into fields, and > then do the insertion - seems quite involved with plpgsql programming.
Well, that's only true if we don't expend some effort to make it better. I could imagine, for instance, that if you specify the EXPLAIN option that turns on this additional output, the output is no longer just a single "text" column but is multiple columns. Perhaps one column could be a key indicating what the other column(s) contain. Another point is that we decided a long time ago that EXPLAIN's plain-text output format is not intended to be machine-parsable, and so objecting to a design on the grounds that it makes machine parsing harder is pretty wrongheaded. I'd think there is plenty of room for dropping in additional output data in the non-text output formats. That needs some careful document-schema design effort, for sure, but it doesn't seem like it would be particularly hard. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers