ClickHouse 26.3 adds pretty=1 and compact=1 options to simplify EXPLAIN output

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ClickHouse 26.3 introduces two new formatting options—pretty=1 and compact=1—for the existing EXPLAIN statement, aimed at making query execution plans easier to read and debug. These are not new SQL commands but optional parameters that change only the visual presentation of the logical plan, not the execution itself. The pretty=1 option renders a detailed tree hierarchy of all plan nodes, while compact=1 strips away wrapper nodes to show only the essential operations. Both options were tested against the Stack Overflow sample dataset—containing roughly 37 million posts and 13 million users—using five progressively complex SQL queries. The addition addresses a longstanding challenge where slow queries were hard to diagnose because raw execution plans were difficult to interpret.

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