Million explain plans…

Back in 2007 I wrote a simple script to add total time to explain analyze output.

It was very helpful, for me.

Then, around a year later figured that it could be useful for others, so wrote a simple site that got plans, and displayed them with extra info. It didn't look great.

Two years later I figured it would be good to make it look nicer. Asked a friend – Łukasz Lewandowski about it, and together we made new version, that was easier on eyes.

Since then there were no layout changes, just some new functionality: deleting plans, anonymizing/obfuscating them, user accounts, plan stats.

The site seemed to catch. In the first month (December of 2008) there were 391 plans added. Almost exactly 10 years later, in October 2018, we got 394 plans added, on average, each day.

Lately the average daily count of new plans (monthly average) is 400-550.

The best day was 21st of February 2019 where we got 5320 new plans. Most likely due to link to site being posted on some news aggregator or forum.

And, just yesterday, at around 4:30pm UTC, there was millionth plan pasted.

That is amazing and I would like to thank all of you – it really brightens my day when I see that people are using the site, and it (hopefully) helps them.

Changes on explain.depesz.com – extracted query from auto-explain plans

Some time ago James Courtney reported missing functionality.

Specifically, when one uses auto-explain, logged explains contain query text. So, when such explain is then pasted on explain.depesz.com, it stands to reason that it should be able to extract the query on its own, without having to manually extract it and put it in query box.

It took me a while, but finally, got it working today. And you can see it in all four explain format:

Also, while I'm writing – it seems that somewhere next month, there will be 1 millionth plan uploaded to the site 🙂 Hope you all find it useful 🙂

explain.depesz.com – now with JITs

Ever since PostgreSQL 11 we have JIT (Just-In-Time compilation).

Information about JIT is displayed in explain analyze plans, but up to this moment, explain.depesz.com didn't display it properly. But not anymore. Thanks to release 1.05 of Pg::Explain and subsequent change in templates for the site, you can now see nice JIT info.

Hope you'll find it useful 🙂

New functionality on explain.depesz.com

Just committed some new changes to explain.depesz.com.

The less visible is that, in case of plans generated by plain EXPLAIN (without ANALYZE), site will no longer show “actual time=.. rows= loops=", which was clearly bogus info.

The more visible is that if you add query to your plan, you can also have it reformatted to (hopefully) nicer format, shown in “REFORMATTED QUERY" tab. For example, take a look at this example.

Reformatting is done using pgFormatter library by Gilles Darold.

I picked this library for the very simple reason – it's in Perl, just like explain.depesz.com site, which made using it a breeze.

You can now add query to your plan on explain.depesz.com

Quite a lot of people have been bugging me about it, and finally got some time, and worked on it.

Long story short – it works.

You can add your query below plan (in separate text area), and then it will be displayed as one of tabs

For example, check this plan.

It also works sensibly-ish, if you want to obfuscate your plans, as you can see here.

In case you're interested in technical details …

Continue reading You can now add query to your plan on explain.depesz.com

Changes on explain.depesz.com

Just pushed some new changes to expain.depesz.com and it's underlying parsing library.

The changes are:

  • If you upload plan in JSON/YAML/XML format, and then you'll look at “TEXT" tab, you will see explain in text format, generated using data from JSON. This explain had slight error in number formatting (3 decimal digits for estimated costs, while text formats use only 2 decimals). THis was reported by ysch on irc. Example plan
  • Numbers in node details (for example: Filtered, or Buffers info) are now commified to make it easier to read. Example plan
  • Fixed parsing of Planning time in JSON, YAML, and XML formats of explains from PostgreSQL 13. Example plans:
    JSON, YAML, and XML.

Some stats, for curious ones:

  • site is up for over 11 years and 6 months
  • so far there have been 843,215 plans added
  • within last 30 days, there have been 484 new plans added daily, on average
  • there are 1295 registered users, but only 780 of them ever added any plans

Changes on explain.depesz.com

I just released new version of Pg::Explain Perl library that is handling parsing of plans for explain.depesz.com.

There are quite a lot of changes, but mostly internal, but one thing is pretty interesting – Pg::Explain, and because of this also explain.depesz.com should be able to parse plans with arbitrary values of border, linestyle, format, unicode_border_linestyle, unicode_column_linestyle, and unicode_header_linestyle psql options.

You can see five simple examples already uploaded:
Continue reading Changes on explain.depesz.com

Fix for displaying aggregates on explain.depesz.com

Couple of days ago RhodiumToad reported, on irc, a bug in explain.depesz.com.

Specifically – if explain was done using JSON/XML/YAML formats, and node type was Aggregate, the site didn't extract full info.

Continue reading Fix for displaying aggregates on explain.depesz.com