Re: IDLE in transaction introspection

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Marti Raudsepp <marti(at)juffo(dot)org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 15:42, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Marti Raudsepp <marti(at)juffo(dot)org> writes:
>>> While we're already breaking everything, we could remove the "waiting"
>>> column and use a state with value 'waiting' instead.
>
>> -1 ... I think it's useful to see the underlying state as well as the
>> waiting flag.  Also, this would represent breakage of part of the API
>> that doesn't need to be broken.
>
> Well the waiting column can stay. My concern is that listing lock-wait
> backends as 'running' will be misleading for users. pg_stat_activity
> is a pretty common starting point for debugging problems and if
> there's a new column that says a query is 'running', then I'm afraid
> the current waiting 't' and 'f' values will be too subtle for users to
> notice. (I find that it's too subtle already now, if you don't know
> what you're looking for).

Maybe there's a better term than "running", like "in progress" or
something of that sort.

--
Robert Haas
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