A Deeper Dive into EXPLAIN

There have been plenty of “explaining EXPLAIN” type talks over the years, which provide a great introduction to it. They often also cover how to identify a few of the more common issues through it. EXPLAIN is a deep topic though, and to do a good introduction talk, you have to skip over a lot of the tricky bits. As such, this talk will not be a good introduction to EXPLAIN, but instead a deeper dive into some of the things most don’t cover. The idea is to start with some of the more complex and unintuitive calculations needed to work out the relationships between operations, rows, threads, loops, timings, buffers, CTEs and subplans. Most popular tools handle at least several of these well, but there are cases where they don’t that are worth being conscious of and alert to. For example, we’ll have a look at whether certain numbers are averaged per-loop or per-thread, or both. We’ll also cover a resulting rounding issue or two to be on the lookout for. Finally, some per-operation timing quirks are worth looking out for where CTEs and subqueries are concerned, for example CTEs that are referenced more than once. As time allows, we can also look at a few rarer issues that can be spotted via EXPLAIN, as well as a few more gotchas that we’ve picked up along the way. This includes things like spotting when the query is JIT, planning, or trigger time dominated, spotting the signs of table and index bloat, issues like lossy bitmap scans or index-only scans fetching from the heap, as well as some things to be aware of when using auto_explain.