Re: Planning time in explain/explain analyze

A patch with updated documentation is attached.

On 01/02/2014 04:08 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> I'm wondering whether the time should be stored inside the PlannedStmt
> node instead of passing it around separately. One possible problem
> with the way you've done things here is that, in the case of a
> prepared statement, EXPLAIN ANALYZE will emit the time needed to call
> GetCachedPlan(), even if that function didn't do any replanning. Now
> you could argue that this is the correct behavior, but I think there's
> a decent argument that what we ought to show there is the amount of
> time that was required to create the plan that we're displaying at the
> time it was created, rather than the amount of time that was required
> to figure out that we didn't need to replan.
>
> A minor side benefit of this approach is that you wouldn't need to
> change the signature for ExplainOnePlan(), which would avoid breaking
> extensions that may call it.

A possible argument against printing the time to create the plan is that
unless it was created when running EXPLAIN we will not know it. I do not
think we want to always measure the time it took to generate a plan due
to slow clocks on some architectures. Also I feel that such a patch
would be more invasive.

Just my reasoning for the current solution. I welcome any opinions about
how to print planning time for prepared statements since I am not a
heavy user of them.

--
Andreas Karlsson