Re: Bogus EXPLAIN results with column aliases for mismatched partitions

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Etsuro Fujita <etsuro.fujita@gmail.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-12-02T21:45:18Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

I wrote:
> Etsuro Fujita <etsuro.fujita@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 6:34 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> BTW, the existing code always schema-qualifies the relation names,
>>> on the rather lame grounds that it's producing the string without
>>> knowing whether EXPLAIN VERBOSE will be specified.  In this code,
>>> the verbose flag is available so it would be trivial to make the
>>> output conform to EXPLAIN's normal policy.  I didn't change that
>>> here because there'd be a bunch more test output diffs of no
>>> intellectual interest.  Should we change it, or leave well enough
>>> alone?

>> I think it would be better to keep that as-is because otherwise, in
>> case of a foreign join or aggregate, EXPLAIN without the VERBOSE
>> option won't show any information about foreign tables involved in
>> that foreign join or aggregate, which isn't useful for users.

> No, I'm just talking about dropping the schema-qualification of table
> names when !es->verbose, not removing the Relations: output altogether.
> That would be more consistent with the rest of EXPLAIN's output.

Concretely, I'm thinking of the attached (on top of the other patch,
which I just pushed).  This agrees exactly with what ExplainTargetRel
does for regular scans.

One could make an argument that we should schema-qualify, regardless
of the "verbose" flag, if the output format isn't EXPLAIN_FORMAT_TEXT.
That would reduce the amount of variability that plan analysis tools
have to cope with.  However, ExplainTargetRel itself doesn't provide
the schema in non-verbose mode.  Maybe it should, ie we should change
it like

         case T_ModifyTable:
             /* Assert it's on a real relation */
             Assert(rte->rtekind == RTE_RELATION);
             objectname = get_rel_name(rte->relid);
-            if (es->verbose)
+            if (es->verbose || es->format != EXPLAIN_FORMAT_TEXT)
                 namespace = get_namespace_name(get_rel_namespace(rte->relid));
             objecttag = "Relation Name";
             break;

(and likewise for function schema names, a bit further down)?

			regards, tom lane

Commits

  1. Further sync postgres_fdw's "Relations" output with the rest of EXPLAIN.

  2. Fix EXPLAIN's column alias output for mismatched child tables.

  3. Add a reverse-translation column number array to struct AppendRelInfo.

  4. Make postgres_fdw's "Relations" output agree with the rest of EXPLAIN.

  5. Allow access to child table statistics if user can read parent table.