I've made a significant effort at filling in the "Using EXPLAIN" section
to be reasonably complete about mentioning everything that EXPLAIN can
output, including the "Rows Removed" outputs that were added by Marko
Tiikkaja's recent documentation-free patch. I also updated the examples to
be consistent with current behavior; several of them were not close to what
the current code will do. No doubt there's more that can be done here, but
I'm out of patience for today.
rather than just $N. This brings the display of nestloop-inner-indexscan
plans back to where it's been, and incidentally improves the display of
SubPlan parameters as well. In passing, simplify the EXPLAIN code by
having it deal primarily in the PlanState tree rather than separately
searching Plan and PlanState trees. This is noticeably cleaner for
subplans, and about a wash elsewhere.
One small difference from previous behavior is that EXPLAIN will no longer
qualify local variable references in inner-indexscan plan nodes, since it
no longer sees such nodes as possibly referencing multiple tables. Vars
referenced through PARAM_EXEC Params are still forcibly qualified, though,
so I don't think the display is any more confusing than before. Adjust a
couple of examples in the documentation to match this behavior.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
Tatsuo Ishii
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway