On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 4:48 AM David Rowley <dgrowle...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sun, 23 Apr 2023, 3:42 am Gurjeet Singh, <gurj...@singh.im> wrote: >> >> I anticipate that edits to Appendix K Postgres Limits will prompt >> improving the note in there about the maximum column limit, That note >> is too wordy, and sometimes confusing, especially for the audience >> that it's written for: newcomers to Postgres ecosystem. > > > I doubt it, but feel free to submit a patch yourself which improves it > without losing the information which the paragraph is trying to convey.
I could not think of a way to reduce the wordiness without losing information. But since this page is usually consulted by those who are new to Postgres, usually sent here by a search engine, I believe the page can be improved for that audience, without losing much in terms of accuracy. I agree the information provided in the paragraph about max-columns is pertinent. But since the limits section is most often consulted by people migrating from other database systems (hence the claim that they're new to the Postgres ecosystem), I imagine the terminology used there may cause confusion for the reader. So my suggestion is to make that paragraph, and perhaps even that page, use fewer hacker/internals terms. Technically, there may be a difference between table vs. relation, row vs. tuple, and column vs. field. But using those terms, seemingly interchangeably on that page does not help the reader. The page neither describes the terms, nor links to their definitions, so a reader is left with more questions than before. For example, > rows per table:: limited by the number of tuples that can fit onto > 4,294,967,295 pages A newcomer> what's a tuple in this context, and how is it similar to/different from a row? Please see attached the proposed patch, which attempts to make that language newcomer-friendly. The patch adds one link for TOAST, and replaces Postgres-specific terms with generic ones. PS: I've retained line boundaries, so that `git diff --color-words doc/src/sgml/limits.sgml` would make it easy to see the changes. Best regards, Gurjeet http://Gurje.et
limits-generic-terms.diff
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