Waiting for PostgreSQL 17 – Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN.

On 3rd of April 2024, Tom Lane committed patch:

Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN.
 
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, SERIALIZE) allows collection of statistics about
the volume of data emitted by a query, as well as the time taken
to convert the data to the on-the-wire format.  Previously there
was no way to investigate this without actually sending the data
to the client, in which case network transmission costs might
swamp what you wanted to see.  In particular this feature allows
investigating the costs of de-TOASTing compressed or out-of-line
data during formatting.
 
Stepan Rutz and Matthias van de Meent,
reviewed by Tomas Vondra and myself
 
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ca0adb0e-fa4e-c37e-1cd7-91170b18cae1@gmx.de

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 17 – Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN.

Waiting for PostgreSQL 16 – Add grantable MAINTAIN privilege and pg_maintain role.

On 14th of December 2022, Jeff Davis committed patch:

Add grantable MAINTAIN privilege and pg_maintain role.
 
Allows VACUUM, ANALYZE, REINDEX, REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW, CLUSTER,
and LOCK TABLE.
 
Effectively reverts 4441fc704d. Instead of creating separate
privileges for VACUUM, ANALYZE, and other maintenance commands, group
them together under a single MAINTAIN privilege.
 
Author: Nathan Bossart
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20221212210136.GA449764@nathanxps13
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/45224.1670476523@sss.pgh.pa.us

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 16 – Add grantable MAINTAIN privilege and pg_maintain role.

Waiting for PostgreSQL 13 – Allow vacuum command to process indexes in parallel.

On 20th of January 2020, Amit Kapila committed patch:

Allow vacuum command to process indexes in parallel.
 
This feature allows the vacuum to leverage multiple CPUs in order to
process indexes.  This enables us to perform index vacuuming and index
cleanup with background workers.  This adds a PARALLEL option to VACUUM
command where the user can specify the number of workers that can be used
to perform the command which is limited by the number of indexes on a
table.  Specifying zero as a number of workers will disable parallelism.
This option can't be used with the FULL option.
 
Each index is processed by at most one vacuum process.  Therefore parallel
vacuum can be used when the table has at least two indexes.
 
The parallel degree is either specified by the user or determined based on
the number of indexes that the table has, and further limited by
max_parallel_maintenance_workers.  The index can participate in parallel
vacuum iff it's size is greater than min_parallel_index_scan_size.
 
Author: Masahiko Sawada and Amit Kapila
 
Mahendra Singh and Sergei Kornilov
 
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/CAD21AoDTPMgzSkV4E3SFo1CH_x50bf5PqZFQf4jmqjk-C03BWg@mail.gmail.com
https://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1J-VoR9gzS5E75pcD-OH0mEyCdp8RihcwKrcuw7J-Q0+w@mail.gmail.com

Continue reading Waiting for PostgreSQL 13 – Allow vacuum command to process indexes in parallel.

Explaining the unexplainable – part 5

In previous posts in this series, I talked about how to read EXPLAIN output, and what each line (operation/node) means.

Now, in the final post, I will try to explain how it happens that Pg chooses “Operation X" over “Operation Y".

Continue reading Explaining the unexplainable – part 5

Waiting for 9.2 – EXPLAIN TIMING

On 7th of February, Robert Haas committed patch:

Sometimes it may be useful to get actual row counts out of EXPLAIN
(ANALYZE) without paying the cost of timing every node entry/exit.
With this patch, you can say EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, TIMING OFF) to get that.
 
Tomas Vondra, reviewed by Eric Theise, with minor doc changes by me.

Continue reading Waiting for 9.2 – EXPLAIN TIMING

Waiting for 9.2 – filtered info in explain analyze

On 22nd of September, Tom Lane committed patch:

Make EXPLAIN ANALYZE report the numbers of rows rejected by filter steps.
 
This provides information about the numbers of tuples that were visited
but not returned by table scans, as well as the numbers of join tuples
that were considered and discarded within a join plan node.
 
There is still some discussion going on about the best way to report counts
for outer-join situations, but I think most of what's in the patch would
not change if we revise that, so I'm going to go ahead and commit it as-is.
 
Documentation changes to follow (they weren't in the submitted patch
either).
 
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Marc Cousin, somewhat revised by Tom

Continue reading Waiting for 9.2 – filtered info in explain analyze

Waiting for 8.5 – hinting for number of distinct values

Robert Haas wrote, and Tom Lane committed (on 2nd of August) patch which adds interesting capability:

Log Message:
-----------
ADD ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET STATISTICS DISTINCT
 
Robert Haas

Log message is rather terse, so what does it exactly do?

Continue reading Waiting for 8.5 – hinting for number of distinct values