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Toward a progress indicator for database queries

Many modern software systems provide progress indicators for long-running tasks. These progress indicators make systems more user-friendly by helping the user quickly estimate how much of the task has been completed and when the task will finish. However, none of the existing commercial RDBMSs provides a non-trival progress indicator for long-running queries. In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting such progress indicators. After discussing the goals and challenges inherent in this problem, we present a set of techniques sufficient for implementing a simple yet useful progress indicator for a large subset of RDBMS queries. We report an initial implementation of these techniques in PostgreSQL.