How to calculate accumulated sum of query timings? - sql

Question

I have a sql file running many queries. I want to see the accumualted sum of all queries. I know that if I turn on timing, or call
\timing
query 1;
query 2;
query 3;
...
query n;
at the beginning of the script, it will start to show time it takes for each query to run. However, I need to have the accumulate results of all queries, without having to manually add them.
Is there a systematic way? If not, how can I fetch the interim times to throw them in a variable.

Answer 1

The pg_stat_statements is a good module that provides a means for tracking execution statistics.
First, add pg_stat_statements to shared_preload_libraries in the
postgresql.conf file. To know where this .conf file exists in your
filesystem, run show config_file;
shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements'
Restart Postgres database
Create the extension
CREATE EXTENSION pg_stat_statements;
Now, the module provides a View, pg_stat_statements, which helps you to analyze various query execution metrics.
Reset the contents of stat collected before running queries.
SELECT pg_stat_statements_reset();
Now, execute your script file containing queries.
\i script_file.sql
You may get all the timing statistics of all the queries executed. To get the total time taken, simply run
select sum(total_time) from pg_stat_statements
where query !~* 'pg_stat_statements';
The time you get is in milliseconds, which may be converted to desired format using various timestamp related Postgres functions

Answer 2

If you want to time the whole script, on linux or mac you can use the time utility to launch the script.
The measurement in this case is a bit more than the sum of the raw query times, because it includes some overhead of starting and running the psql command. On my system this overhead is around 20ms.
$ time psql < script.sql
…
real 0m0.117s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.007s
The real value is the time it took to execute the whole script, including the aforementioned overhead.
The approach in this answer is a crude, simple client side way to measure the runtime of the overall script. It is not useful to measure milli-second precision server side execution times. It still might be sufficient for many use-cases.
The solution of Kaushik Nayak is a way more precise method to time executions directly on the server. It also provides much more insight into the execution (eg. query level times).