Re: pgAdminIII and the LogFile - useless for debugging

[Andreas Pflug <pgadmin(at)pse-consulting(dot)de>]

Scott Chapman wrote:
> pgAdminIII 1.2.0 PostgreSQL 8.0
>
> I moved over from Linux to do some work with Pg on Windows.  Windows 
> doesn't have a "tail" command unless you use cygwin tail it from there.
>
> So, I was quite happy to see the Tools->Server Status->LogFile option in 
> pgAdminIII.
>
> The first thing I noticed is that it doesn't "tail".  The scroll bar 
> stays where it was an you move it manually.  That's something I can live 
> with but I'd love to see it able to put the latest queries on top or 
> scroll the bar and allow you to scroll back to get into the history buffer.
>
> Anyway, I turned my logging level to LOG and my log_statement to all so 
> I can see what is actually being SELECTED.  This is a great way to debug 
> your web application in my experience.  Imagine my disappointment when 
> the log file started filling up with this junk:
>
> 2005-03-01 17:39:04 LOG:  statement: SELECT pg_file_length('C:/Program 
> Files/PostgreSQL/8.0/data/pg_log/postgresql-2005-03-01_173622.log') AS len
> 2005-03-01 17:39:04 LOG:  statement: SELECT len FROM pg_file_stat($1) AS 
> s(len int8, c timestamp, a timestamp, m timestamp, i bool)
> 2005-03-01 17:39:04 CONTEXT:  SQL function "pg_file_length" during inlining
>
> ...making it virtually completely useless.

I'm struck by this myself, you can set the automatic refresh to 0 to get 
the log ony on demand.

> PgAdmin needs to find another way to get the log file length besides a 
> SQL query to the database!

No, the real trouble is that logfile isn't quite convenient for client 
side debugging. If you know e.g. M$SQL's profiler, you'd agree that 
there's nothing similar on pgsql. I'd like to see it, so please head 
over to pgsql-hackers for that. There's currently a thread "logging as 
inserts" active, which could be a basis for this.

Regards,
Andreas