Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > The cost of not aborting on the first sort is that you may never see > what the part of the plan is that's killing your query, since you never > get the actual plan. Well, you can get the plan without waiting a long time; that's what plain EXPLAIN is for. But I still disagree with the premise that you can extrapolate anything very useful from an unfinished EXPLAIN ANALYZE run. As an example, if the plan involves setup steps such as sorting or loading a hashtable, cancelling after a minute might make it look like the setup step is the big problem, distracting you from the possibility that the *rest* of the plan would take weeks to run if you ever got to it. regards, tom lane
