{"id":4900,"date":"2016-08-11T22:18:48","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T22:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/?p=4900"},"modified":"2016-08-11T22:18:48","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T22:18:48","slug":"postgres-select-explain-output-query","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.garysieling.com\/blog\/postgres-select-explain-output-query\/","title":{"rendered":"Postgres: select &#8216;explain&#8217; output into a query"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With Postgres, you can&#8217;t easily use the output of &#8220;explain&#8221; in a query.  For instance, you might wish to write a query like this, but it is not possible syntactically:<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"sql\">\nselect * from (\n  explain \n    select * from test_table\n) data\n<\/pre>\n<p>However, you can execute explain as a function, from within another Postgres.<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"sql\">\nCREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION explain_output(query text) returns text AS\n$BODY$\nDECLARE\n    query_explain  text;\n    explanation    text;\nBEGIN\n  query_explain := e'EXPLAIN(FORMAT json) ' || query;\n  execute query_explain INTO explanation;\n  return explanation;\nEND;\n$BODY$\nLANGUAGE plpgsql;\n\nselect test2('select * from test_table')\n<\/pre>\n<p>One nice feature of this is you can chose a format that is easily parsed, like JSON or XML, so you get a result like this<sup><a href=\"#footnote_1_4900\" id=\"identifier_1_4900\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-identifier-link\" title=\"http:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/questions\/7682102\/putting-explain-results-into-a-table\">1<\/a><\/sup>:<\/p>\n<pre lang=\"javascript\">\n[\n  {\n    \"Plan\": {\n      \"Node Type\": \"Seq Scan\",\n      \"Relation Name\": \"test_table\",\n      \"Alias\": \"test_table\",\n      \"Startup Cost\": 0.00,\n      \"Total Cost\": 9.87,\n      \"Plan Rows\": 87,\n      \"Plan Width\": 4899\n    }\n  }\n]\n<\/pre>\n<p>The downside to looking at the execution plan is that it works best when there isn&#8217;t an index already, so in the future we&#8217;ll be looking for a way to address this.<\/p>\n<ol class=\"footnotes\"><li id=\"footnote_1_4900\" class=\"footnote\">http:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/questions\/7682102\/putting-explain-results-into-a-table<span class=\"footnote-back-link-wrapper\"> [<a href=\"#identifier_1_4900\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-back-link\">&#8617;<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to get the results of a Postgres &#8216;explain&#8217; into a useable SQL data structure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[437,523],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO 4.9.9 - 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