> > Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant by "functional" interface. But if > I said maybe the format implemented by the patch is maybe too close to > how we store the statistics, then this has exactly the same issue. And > it has other issues too, I think - it breaks down the stats into > multiple function calls, so ensuring the sanity/correctness of whole > sets of statistics gets much harder, I think. >
Export functions was my original plan, for simplicity, maintenance, etc, but it seemed like I'd be adding quite a few functions, so the one view made more sense for an initial version. Also, I knew that pg_dump or some other stats exporter would have to inline the guts of those functions into queries for older versions, and adapting a view definition seemed more straightforward for the reader than function definitions.
