Provide the option of displaying Explain Plans as JSON

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

Its a feature request - Currently the Explain plan can only be displayed as nested text. In a web based console, its not easy to render this in a user friendly way.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be great to the option of having the Explain plan shown as a JSON document. If DataFusion is used as a query engine in a product with a web interface, its easier to render an explain plan in a user friendly way if its JSON rather than parsing out the current text format i.e. the JSON can be rendered easier in a browser in any way the app provider wishes.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

This would be neat -- there is already some way to display plans using the graphviz (dot) format https://docs.rs/datafusion-expr/23.0.0/datafusion_expr/logical_plan/enum.LogicalPlan.html#method.display_graphviz which might get you started

FWIW a form of this is already supported by datafusion-proto. You can convert the LogicalPlan / ExecutionPlan to the proto representation and then serialize that.

Postgres JSON format for explain provided by #15166

For example

> explain format PGJSON select 1;
+--------------+-----------------------------------------+
| plan_type    | plan                                    |
+--------------+-----------------------------------------+
| logical_plan | [                                       |
|              |   {                                     |
|              |     "Plan": {                           |
|              |       "Expressions": [                  |
|              |         "Int64(1)"                      |
|              |       ],                                |
|              |       "Node Type": "Projection",        |
|              |       "Output": [                       |
|              |         "Int64(1)"                      |
|              |       ],                                |
|              |       "Plans": [                        |
|              |         {                               |
|              |           "Node Type": "EmptyRelation", |
|              |           "Output": [],                 |
|              |           "Plans": []                   |
|              |         }                               |
|              |       ]                                 |
|              |     }                                   |
|              |   }                                     |
|              | ]                                       |
+--------------+-----------------------------------------+
1 row(s) fetched.
Elapsed 0.019 seconds.

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Provide the option of displaying Explain Plans as JSON #6137

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Provide the option of displaying Explain Plans as JSON #6137

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Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

Describe the solution you'd like

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

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alamb commented on Apr 27, 2023

tustvold commented on Apr 28, 2023

Jefffrey commented on Sep 15, 2025

alamb commented on Sep 15, 2025

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