[cfors]

It would always be nonsensical unless you were running on the database you were targeting (or one that contained similar data distributions).

However, with Postgres its pretty trivial to get a JSON format of the output if you needed a machine parseable answer. I don't know of a library that does this for you, but it wouldn't surprise me if one existed.

    explain (format json, analyze, buffers) select 1

[anonymousDan]

Great, thanks. How modular is the postgres codebase? Would it be relatively easy to factor out the part of the code that does the above from the rest of the database (e.g. from the execution or storage engines)?