Hi,

On 06/26/2017 05:18 PM, Alexander Korotkov wrote:
Hackers,

I see that design question for PostgreSQL pluggable storages is very hard.

IMHO it's mostly expected to be hard.

Firstly, PostgreSQL is a mature product with many advanced features, and reworking a low-level feature without breaking something on top of it is hard by definition.

Secondly, project policies and code quality requirements set the bar very high too, I think.

> BTW, I think it worth analyzing existing use-cases of pluggable
storages.  I think that the most famous DBMS with pluggable storage API
is MySQL. This why I decided to start with it. I've added
MySQL/MariaDB section on wiki page.
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Future_of_storage#MySQL.2FMariaDB
It appears that significant part of MySQL storage engines are misuses. MySQL lacks of various features like FDWs or writable views and so on. This is why developers created a lot of pluggable storages for that purposes. We definitely don't want something like this in PostgreSQL now. I created special resume column where I expressed whether it
would be nice to have something like this table engine in PostgreSQL.


I don't want to discourage you, but I'm not sure how valuable this is.

I agree it's valuable to have a an over-view of use cases for pluggable storage, but I don't think we'll get that from looking at MySQL. As you noticed, most of the storage engines are misuses, so it's difficult to learn anything valuable from them. You can argue that using FDWs to implement alternative storage engines is a misuse too, but at least that gives us a valid use case (columnar storage implemented using FDW).

If anything, the MySQL storage engines should serve as a cautionary tale how not to do things - there's also a plenty of references in the MySQL "Restrictions and Limitations" section of the manual:

  https://downloads.mysql.com/docs/mysql-reslimits-excerpt-5.7-en.pdf

regards

--
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services


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