Re: machine-readable explain output

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Tom Lane<tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> In any event, considering that EXPLAIN is a utility statement and
>> can't be embedded within a query, I'm not sure what benefit we get out
>> of returning the data as XML rather than text.  This doesn't seem
>> likely to change either, based on Tom's comments here.
>
>> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-05/msg00969.php
>
> I think you misinterpreted the point of that example, which is that
> there already is a way to get the output of EXPLAIN into the system
> for further processing.  Were this not so, we wouldn't be worrying
> at all what data type it claims to have.  But since there is a way,
> it's important what data type it produces.

Well, if you get the EXPLAIN output into the system by defining a
wrapper function, said wrapper function will return the type that it's
defined to return, regardless of what EXPLAIN itself returns, no?

I don't have a problem making it return XML; I'm just not exactly sure
how to do it. Is it possible to get that working without depending on
libxml? How?

...Robert