Is a local-only deployment without dblink on the roadmap?

[dbeaverforpostgres]

Hello Andrei,

We are currently evaluating pg_profile 4.15 in an environment where the use of the PostgreSQL dblink extension is subject to architectural review.

During our analysis we noticed that many pg_profile queries executed through:

dblink('server_connection', server_query)

ultimately target local statistics views such as:

pg_stat_activity
pg_stat_database
pg_stat_wal
pg_stat_bgwriter

We understand from the documentation that pg_profile was designed to collect statistics from remote PostgreSQL servers and therefore depends on dblink. We also found explicit runtime checks requiring the dblink extension and the release documentation states that dblink is a prerequisite.

Before considering a custom fork, we would like to understand whether there are any future plans to support:

a local-only collection mode without dblink;
an alternative implementation based on direct local queries;
support for postgres_fdw or another mechanism instead of dblink;
a configuration option that would make dblink optional when collecting statistics only from the local instance.

We would appreciate your thoughts on whether such a feature aligns with the long-term roadmap of the project.

Thank you for your work on pg_profile.

[zubkov-andrei]

Hi!

dblink is our pain. We are thinking about several approaches to address this issue, but there is no one common solution yet. The main problem here is not the ability of data collection from the other clusters, but collection of object statistics from databases of the same cluster.

There should be more or less convenient solution in the case where there is only one database in the cluster, but this is definitely a partial solution. I don't think it worse the effort.

We can collect only the clusterwide stats avoiding relations and functions, but it seems report without object statistics won't be useful.

FDW is also a partial solution because it is still a connection. Also, FDW is complicated it - needs special privileges for the profile user to create foreign servers and tables.