Re: [HACKERS] Lets (not) break all the things. Was: [pgsql-advocacy] 9.6 -> 10.0

[Justin Clift]

On 13 May 2016, at 21:42, Josh berkus  wrote:
> On 05/13/2016 01:04 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> On 05/13/2016 12:03 PM, Josh berkus wrote:
>>> On 05/13/2016 11:48 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
 On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 12:12 PM, Joshua D. Drake
  wrote:
>> 
>>> Anyway, all of this is a moot point, because nobody has the power to
>>> tell the various companies what to do.  We're just lucky that everyone
>>> is still committed to writing stuff which adds to PostgreSQL.
>> 
>> Lucky? No. We earned it. We earned it through years and years of hard
>> work. Should we be thankful? Absolutely. Should we be grateful that we
>> have such a powerful and engaged commercial contribution base? 100%.
> 
> Lucky.  Sure there was work and personal integrity involved, but like
> any success story, there was luck.
> 
> But we've also been fortunate in not spawning hostile-but-popular forks
> by people who left the project, and that none of the companies who
> created hostile forks were very successful with them, and that nobody
> has seriously tried using lawyers to control/ruin the project.
> 
> And, most importantly, we've been lucky that a lot of competing projects
> have self-immolated instead of being successful and brain-draining our
> contributors (MySQL, ANTS, MonetDB, etc.)

Oracle buying MySQL (via Sun) seems to have helped things along pretty
well too. :)

+ Justin

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi



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Re: [HACKERS] Lets (not) break all the things. Was: [pgsql-advocacy] 9.6 -> 10.0

[Justin Clift]

On 12 Apr 2016, at 17:23, Merlin Moncure <mmonc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:39 AM, Justin Clift <jus...@postgresql.org> wrote:
>> Moving over a conversation from the pgsql-advocacy mailing list.  In it
>> Simon (CC'd) raised the issue of potentially creating a 
>> backwards-compatibility
>> breaking release at some point in the future, to deal with things that
>> might have no other solution (my wording).
>> 
>> Relevant part of that thread there for reference:
>> 
>>  
>> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CANP8+jLtk1NtaJyXc=hAqX=0k+ku4zfavgvbkfs+_sor9he...@mail.gmail.com
>> 
>> Simon included a short starter list of potentials which might be in
>> that category:
>> 
>>  * SQL compliant identifiers
>>  * Remove RULEs
>>  * Change recovery.conf
>>  * Change block headers
>>  * Retire template0, template1
>>  * Optimise FSM
>>  * Add heap metapage
>>  * Alter tuple headers
>>  et al
>> 
>> This still is better placed on -hackers though, so lets have the
>> conversation here to figure out if a "backwards compatibility breaking"
>> release really is needed or not.
> 
> A couple of points here:
> *) I don't think having a version number that starts with 10 instead
> of 9 magically fixes backwards compatibility problems and I think
> that's a dangerous precedent to set unless we're willing to fork
> development and support version 9 indefinitely including major release
> versions.
> 
> *) Compatibility issues at the SQL level have to be taken much more
> seriously than other things (like internal layouts or .conf issues).
> 
> *) We need to do an honest cost benefit analysis before breaking
> things.  Code refactors placed on your users puts an enormous cost
> that is often underestimated.  I have some fairly specific examples of
> the costs related to the text cast removal for example.  It's not a
> pretty picture.

Yeah.  Moving the discussion here was more to determine which items
really would need a backwards compatible break.  eg no other approach can
be found.

Seems I started it off badly, as no-one's yet jumped in to discuss the
initial points. :(

+ Justin

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi



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Re: [HACKERS] Lets (not) break all the things. Was: [pgsql-advocacy] 9.6 -> 10.0

[Justin Clift]

On 12 Apr 2016, at 14:12, Yury Zhuravlev <u.zhurav...@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
> Justin Clift wrote:
>> Simon included a short starter list of potentials which might be in
>> that category:
>> 
>>  * SQL compliant identifiers
>>  * Remove RULEs
>>  * Change recovery.conf
>>  * Change block headers
>>  * Retire template0, template1
>>  * Optimise FSM
>>  * Add heap metapage
>>  * Alter tuple headers
>>  et al
> 
> + CMake build I think.
> 
> Now I can build:
> * postgres
> * bin/* programs
> * pl/* languages
> * contrib/* (with cmake PGXS analogue)
> 
> Can run regression and isolation tests for postgres/pl* and all contrib 
> modules. 
> There is still a lot of work but I hope everything will turn out. Also it 
> would be good to get help.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> PS https://github.com/stalkerg/postgres_cmake

If/when PostgreSQL can be built and tested with CMake... why would the
resulting code + database files + network protocol (etc) not be compatible
with previous versions? :)

+ Justin

--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi



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[HACKERS] Lets (not) break all the things. Was: [pgsql-advocacy] 9.6 -> 10.0

[Justin Clift]

Moving over a conversation from the pgsql-advocacy mailing list.  In it
Simon (CC'd) raised the issue of potentially creating a backwards-compatibility
breaking release at some point in the future, to deal with things that
might have no other solution (my wording).

Relevant part of that thread there for reference:

  
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CANP8+jLtk1NtaJyXc=hAqX=0k+ku4zfavgvbkfs+_sor9he...@mail.gmail.com

Simon included a short starter list of potentials which might be in
that category:

  * SQL compliant identifiers
  * Remove RULEs
  * Change recovery.conf
  * Change block headers
  * Retire template0, template1
  * Optimise FSM
  * Add heap metapage
  * Alter tuple headers
  et al

This still is better placed on -hackers though, so lets have the
conversation here to figure out if a "backwards compatibility breaking"
release really is needed or not.

Hopefully we can get it all done without giving users a reason to consider
switching. ;)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi



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Re: [HACKERS] [pgsql-www] pg_autovacuum is nice ... but ...

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
Should I add a TODO to warn if FSM values are too small?  Is that doable?
It sounds like it should be, and it would be a valuable pointer to 
people, so yep.

Any idea who'd be interested in claiming it?
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] Improvements to PostgreSQL

[Justin Clift]

Suresh Tri wrote:
snip
 All your sugestions are welcome. Please help us to
 implement these features.
 Our aim is to make postgresql enterprise level.
Hi Suresh,
From reading your post, I feel your team is approaching the goal of 
making PostgreSQL Enterprise Level in a non-optimal way.

With the soon to be released version 7.5 of PostgreSQL, the core 
database engine itself is already very good.  This is not the area 
needing to be worked upon for the next level of Enterprise Functionality.

Your team will likely have a lot more effect if they concentrate on what 
Enterprises really need that PostgreSQL is missing:

 + An SNMP agent to report on PostgreSQL's status and allows remote 
control of the PostgreSQL daemon.  From an Oracle perspective, this 
would be the equivalent of Oracle Intelligent Agents, part of the core 
features of the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM).

 + Tools to allow control of PostgreSQL databases from one central 
place.  Again, the same as OEM.

   + Starting and stopping the database
   + Managing Users
   + Backup and Recovery
   + Alerts and submitting jobs
   + etc
   Oracle does this by having a centralised information repository that 
a management GUI connects too, and having Oracle Intelligent Agents 
running on each server the database software is on.  These Oracle 
Intelligent Agents keep the centralised repository aware of the status 
of the Oracle server software, perform actions on the Oracle servers as 
directed by the centralised repository (jobs running on there, 
instructions by the GUI, etc), and more.

   There's more to what the OEM GUI does, but that's a good start.
   + Something else that would be useful is a GUI tool to automatically 
setup PostgreSQL replication.  The PostgreSQL Slony-I project would be 
the first one to look at, and probably equivalent to something like 
Oracle's Data Guard.  They use the different approach, but the end 
result is having a master and standby databases.

Hope this is helpful.
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
 Thanks,
 Suresh
snip

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Re: [HACKERS] Improvements to PostgreSQL

[Justin Clift]

Patrick Welche wrote:
snip
Is there more to remote control than setting GUC variables? Tell me more!
Sure:
 + starting/restarting/stopping the database server software
 + the normal DBA type work - creating/altering/dropping databases, 
users, functions, languages, permissions (etc)
 + Remote backup and recovery
 + Submitting jobs to run remotely on the server.  i.e. reindexing or 
vacuuming scripts

 Remote Monitoring:
 + Alerts for specified events.  i.e. The database server is getting 
near to capacity in it's filesystem(s), or there have been too many 
invalid PG authorisation attempts, or there are connections getting 
rejected because the max_connections parameter isn't high enough

 Groups
 + Defining arbitrary groups of servers for the above to speed things 
up when working with many servers

 Roles
 + Having multiple administrators with different permissions (role 
based is generally good), all communicating through the centralised info 
repository so things don't get out of sync

 (possibly)
 + loading additional PG packages.  i.e. rolling out oid2name or 
pgbench (or other PG utils) to servers.  Could be viewed as something 
that should be done with the OS packaging mechanism(s) instead.

Any of the PG GUI's (I generally use pgAdmin) could likely be extended 
to do all of this in a nice, user friendly way.

As an aside, SNMP is important in enterprise settings as it allows PG to 
be plugged into the monitoring capabilities of enterprise management 
frameworks.  i.e. Concord's eHealth, and probably Tivoli, OpenView, etc

Hope that's useful.
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
Cheers,
Patrick

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[HACKERS] pg_dump - option for just dumping sequences?

[Justin Clift]

Hi all,
Came across a scenario today where I want to backup the latest values of 
sequences in the database, so they can be restored along with the data 
from a COPY command.

Looked at pg_dump's output options (for 7.4/7.5) and there doesn't seem 
to be an easy way for just dumping sequence definitions (with the latest 
sequence numbers).

Thought about using egrep too, but had difficulties there too.
Does anyone else think it would be a useful thing adding an option to 
pg_dump for outputting just the sequences?

Or perhaps there's an easy way of doing this I just haven't thought of?
:-)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] pg_dump - option for just dumping sequences?

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
Does anyone else think it would be a useful thing adding an option to 
pg_dump for outputting just the sequences?

Or perhaps there's an easy way of doing this I just haven't thought of?
Can't you just grep the output for pg_catalog.setval and SET SESSION 
AUTHORIZATION?
Arrrgh, yep.
Thanks Chris, I must be in space cadet mode today.  :(
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

Chris


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Re: [HACKERS] [pgsql-www] Problems logging into CVS server

[Justin Clift]

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
Damn ... I'll have to look at it ... we had a hacker get in through the 
way anoncvs was setup, so I set a passwd on in /etc/passwd (but didn't 
touch the anoncvs setup itself) ... will play with it tonight and see if 
I can figure out how to do a more secure anon-cvs ;(  I have to be 
missing something in the config *sigh*
Um, that sounds worrying.  Was the activity of the hacker anything that 
would affect PG code, or access to anything sensitive (account 
passwords, etc)?

Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: Release planning (was: Re: [HACKERS] Status report)

[Justin Clift]

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
snip
As Jan points out, its the 'small features that are done' that we've 
been griping about having to wait for, not the big ones which we know 
aren't done ...
snip
Hmmm... so we do things slightly differently than previously...
This upcoming version could be PG version 8.0,
We continue with bugfixes on 7.4.x,
That still leaves 7.5.x, 7.6.x (etc if needed), for releasing new 
versions of PG without the big features.

Kind of like an in-between thing, whilst waiting for the major features 
in the major releases?

That would mean we'd have:
Version 8.0 as our next main release,
Version 9.0 being the version after that with the next big features in it.
Version 8.x being version 8 plus smaller features, prior to 9.0
Version 8.x.x being version 8.x plus bug fixes.
Sounds like it could get hairy if we're not careful, but I reckon the PG 
Community is mature enough to make the right calls where needed.

:)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] Status report

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
If you get full control of PostgreSQL, you can dictate what will happen.
Until then, I will follow the community consensus, which may or may not
match your opinion.
Um, let's take the time to get the features in, otherwise we'll be 
waiting another year (roughly) to get PITR and others out to end users.

:)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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[HACKERS] Loadable Oracle Personality: WAS LinuxTag wrapup thread

[Justin Clift]

Simon Riggs wrote:
snip
External tool is one thing, but the loadable personality seems like a
very good idea and worth discussing further.
Would an interesting, and maybe slightly different way of viewing a 
loadable personality, be as a set of rules that can be applied to 
parser input before the parser actually gets it... and massages input 
SQL into something for the parser to understand.

I'm hugely generalising here of course, but you know how we have a 
PostgreSQL Rules system that rewrites queries before handing them to 
the query planner... well, would it be possible/practical to potentially 
have a Rules system that rewrites incoming SQL before it gets given to 
the normal parser.

Might get complicated though... we'd need a pre-parser or something.
However, having a generalised system for doing this may make it far 
easier to provide personalities.  i.e. load a set of Oracle 8i rules, 
load a set of Oracle 9i rules, load a set of DB2 x, rules, etc.

:)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] LinuxTag wrapup

[Justin Clift]

Mario Weilguni wrote:
Because their SQL queries always seem to need a target object to select 
from.  i.e. SELECT NEXTVAL.foo isn't valid for Oracle 8/9.
snip
It has been a long time since I've used Oracle, but shouldn't it be select foo.nextval from dual?
Yep, that's sounds better.  It's been a couple of months since I was 
writing SQL in Oracle.  Previous contract.

:)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

Regards,
Mario Weilguni
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Re: [HACKERS] LinuxTag wrapup

[Justin Clift]

Andreas Pflug wrote:
snip
That's true, it's the question how much can be offered without too much 
effort.
I'm not too deep in oracle stuff, what comes to my mind is
- outer join syntax (parser thing)
- sequences usage (parser too)
- maybe stored procedure call, with a wrapper to convert output 
parameters to a composite return value.
There's also their FROM DUAL workaround (in common usage) as well.
i.e. SELECT NEXTVAL.foo FROM DUAL;
Because their SQL queries always seem to need a target object to select 
from.  i.e. SELECT NEXTVAL.foo isn't valid for Oracle 8/9.

Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

There's certainly no point supporting any weird ddl command, so there's 
still porting work to be done when migrating.

Regards,
Andreas

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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
Well, if we add them (and they would be very useful I reckon) should 
we ensure there's an obvious PG naming thing happening?
Why are they useful If you want PG specific stuff then use the PG 
specific catalogs!!!
My take on this is that it's a LOT easier for people who don't know the 
internals of the PG catalogs to be able to query the information schema, 
as in the information schema things are generally explicitly named.

Much easier for non-experts, which most people don't want to have to 
invest the time in becoming.

Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
Chris

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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
snip
Anyone who's writing queries that are examing the schema of the database 
is by definition not a newbie...
By newbie here, I mean someone who's a PG newbie but has a reasonable 
understanding of databases (i.e. Oracle, etc) would generally find the 
information_schema much easier to locate and use information in 
compared to having to learn the PG internals.

There's a whole lot of difference between the skill level needed to 
query the information_schema and find out things like table and column 
names, vs looking into pg_namespace, pg_class and pg_attribute plus 
understanding the specific info there to work out table and column names.

I reckon that having information pre-prepared in views like those in 
information_schema is of course going to be easier for people than 
raw information our internal catalogs.

Do you get where I'm coming from with this?
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
Chris


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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
There's a whole lot of difference between the skill level needed to 
query the information_schema and find out things like table and column 
names, vs looking into pg_namespace, pg_class and pg_attribute plus 
understanding the specific info there to work out table and column names.

I reckon that having information pre-prepared in views like those in 
information_schema is of course going to be easier for people than 
raw information our internal catalogs.

Do you get where I'm coming from with this?

Yes, but I disagree.  Your opinion is as an experienced user anyway, and 
you're just putting words in novice mouths...
That I directly disagree with.  I'm putting forth the viewpoint of the 
people I work with here, who aren't PG experienced.  They're Oracle 
experienced.

We've never had someone complain about querying stuff like that.  For 
example, why do you need the comments on columns?
The comment on columns addition to the constraint_column_usage view 
was a suggestion for our particular environment, where it's easier for 
some of the Perl programmers to have one view that shows them all of the 
needed info.

I'm not super caring either if we add this stuff or not to PG, it was 
just a suggestion from the trying to be helpful POV.

However, saying that people who aren't experienced with PG can easily 
(i.e. time efficiently) figure out how to query table and column names 
from PG by going through the pg_catalog stuff in comparison to things 
like information_schema.* is just not right.

One other benefit of having more stuff in information_schema.* is that 
the stuff there is easier to look at and figure out what it is.  With 
the view definitions that are provided to things like psql and pgAdmin 
when people look at an information_schema view, it provides them a way 
of figuring out where in the internal tables stuff is if they want to 
look for it.  i.e. they can find a column in 
information_schema.constraint_column_usage and go gee where is that in 
the real PostgreSQL tables?  Then look at the code that generates it 
and so on.

:)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

Chris


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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Justin Clift [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Not sure how worthwhile others will find this small patch (to CVS HEAD), 
but we found it useful.  It adds the column comments to the 
information_schema.columns view.

This question has been touched on before, but I guess it's time to face
it fair and square: is it reasonable for an SQL implementation to add
implementation-specific columns to an information_schema view?  One
could certainly argue that the entire point of information_schema is
to be *standard*, not more, not less.  OTOH I do not know if adding
an extra column is likely to break anyone's application.  Comments?
Well, I suppose it reduces application portability if anyone starts 
relying on it.

?
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

regards, tom lane


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[HACKERS] Bug with view definitions?

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,
Not sure if this is a known issue or not, but I think I may have found a 
bug with the way view definitions are shown... at least in psql.

Using 7.5 development CVS (as of a few hours ago) or even 7.4.3, if I 
connect using it's version of psql to a database (of the same version), 
then use psql to view the information_schema.constraint_columns_usage 
view, it gives me this definition:

***
mydb=# \d information_schema.constraint_column_usage
 View information_schema.constraint_column_usage
   Column   |   Type| Modifiers
+---+---
 table_catalog  | information_schema.sql_identifier |
 table_schema   | information_schema.sql_identifier |
 table_name | information_schema.sql_identifier |
 column_name| information_schema.sql_identifier |
 constraint_catalog | information_schema.sql_identifier |
 constraint_schema  | information_schema.sql_identifier |
 constraint_name| information_schema.sql_identifier |
View definition:
 SELECT current_database()::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
table_catalog, x.tblschema::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
table_schema, x.tblname::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
table_name, x.colname::information_schema.sql_identifier AS column_name, 
current_database()::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
constraint_catalog, x.cstrschema::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
constraint_schema, x.cstrname::information_schema.sql_identifier AS 
constraint_name
   FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT nr.nspname, r.relname, r.relowner, a.attname, 
nc.nspname, c.conname
   FROM pg_namespace nr, pg_class r, pg_attribute a, pg_depend 
d, pg_namespace nc, pg_constraint c
  WHERE nr.oid = r.relnamespace AND r.oid = a.attrelid AND 
d.refclassid = 'pg_class'::regclass::oid AND d.refobjid = r.oid AND 
d.refobjsubid = a.attnum AND d.classid = 'pg_constraint'::regclass::oid 
AND d.objid = c.oid AND c.connamespace = nc.oid AND c.contype = 
'c'::char AND r.relkind = 'r'::char AND NOT a.attisdropped
  ORDER BY nr.nspname, r.relname, r.relowner, a.attname, 
nc.nspname, c.conname
UNION ALL
 SELECT nr.nspname, r.relname, r.relowner, a.attname, nc.nspname, c.conname
   FROM pg_namespace nr, pg_class r, pg_attribute a, pg_namespace nc, 
pg_constraint c, information_schema._pg_keypositions() pos(n)
  WHERE nr.oid = r.relnamespace AND r.oid = a.attrelid AND nc.oid = 
c.connamespace AND
CASE
WHEN c.contype = 'f'::char THEN r.oid = c.confrelid AND 
c.confkey[pos.n] = a.attnum
ELSE r.oid = c.conrelid AND c.conkey[pos.n] = a.attnum
END AND NOT a.attisdropped AND (c.contype = 'p'::char OR 
c.contype = 'u'::char OR c.contype = 'f'::char) AND r.relkind = 
'r'::char) x(tblschema, tblname, tblowner, colname, cstrschema, 
cstrname), pg_user u
  WHERE x.tblowner = u.usesysid AND u.usename = current_user();

mydb=#
***
However, when I use this definition (cut-n-paste style to avoid 
mistakes) to create the view anew (even with a different name, etc), 
then it gives me an error:

***
mydb=# \e
ERROR:  parse error at or near ALL at character 1105
ERROR:  parse error at or near ALL at character 1105
LINE 6: UNION ALL
  ^
mydb=#
***
I haven't come across this before, and am having the same problem with 
pgAdmin3 as well, as it supplies the exact same definition of the view.

I think I'm doing everything right here, could this be a bug with PG?
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] Bug with view definitions?

[Justin Clift]

Dennis Bjorklund wrote:
snip
I've still not checked any code. I don't even know what part of pg it is 
that produce that bad SQL. The view itself works, so it must be the pretty 
printer that is broken (where ever that is hidden away in the code).
Thanks Dennis.
So, it's definitely a bug then.  I wasn't sure if it was PG or me.  :)
Um, as I'm not up to the task of fixing it, is this something you or 
someone else would be interested in?

Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
There is a huge difference between adhering to a standard and limiting
yourself to a standard.  The real question is whether PostgreSQL's
goal is to support SQL standards, or whether PostgreSQL's goal is to
give PostgreSQL users a useful set of tools.

There are literally _hundreds_ of fields we could add to the 
information_schema.  Either we add them all or we add none of them.
Well, if we add them (and they would be very useful I reckon) should we 
ensure there's an obvious PG naming thing happening?

i.e.  pg_column_comment
or similar?  Maybe not pg_ but you know what I mean.
:-)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift

Chris


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Re: [HACKERS] Bug with view definitions?

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip
Actually, if you look at the source code (information_schema.sql) there
is no ORDER BY in it, only a DISTINCT.  The ORDER BY gets added by the
parser to help implement the DISTINCT.  Sooner or later we should look
at suppressing the added ORDER BY when displaying the view.
If someone fixes this can we make sure it goes into 7.4.4 as well (if 
it's not a drastic code change)?

It's not a data corrupting bug but it's stopping view definitions from 
working as advertised which is bad if you're used to being able to 
rely on them.  :-/

For now, I'll personally use the pg_dump version of the query, or maybe 
see if the one in backend/catalog/information_schema.sql can be run 
directly.  :)

Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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Re: [HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
snip
If there is that much clamor for this, why not make a new schema,
such as pginformation_schema People could then tweak the views
to their heart's content, while keeping 100% compliance.
Doesn't sound very neat.
If we add a pginformation_schema, then it'd probably contain all of the 
existing information_schema... plus more.  Reduplication?

I guess we could just leverage off the existing information_schema views:
i.e.
CREATE VIEW pg_information_schmema.some_view AS SELECT * FROM 
information_schema.some_view (then add extra bits).

But it still doesn't sound very neat.
?
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
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[HACKERS] Adding column comment to information_schema.columns

[Justin Clift]

Hi all,
Not sure how worthwhile others will find this small patch (to CVS HEAD), 
but we found it useful.  It adds the column comments to the 
information_schema.columns view.

Hope it's useful.
:-)
Regards and best wishes,
Justin Clift
*** information_schema.sql.orig 2004-07-01 11:59:26.0 +1000
--- information_schema.sql  2004-07-01 12:33:01.0 +1000
***
*** 442,448 
  
 CAST(null AS cardinal_number) AS maximum_cardinality,
 CAST(a.attnum AS sql_identifier) AS dtd_identifier,
!CAST('NO' AS character_data) AS is_self_referencing
  
  FROM (pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef ad ON attrelid = adrelid AND attnum = 
adnum),
   pg_class c, pg_namespace nc, pg_user u,
--- 442,450 
  
 CAST(null AS cardinal_number) AS maximum_cardinality,
 CAST(a.attnum AS sql_identifier) AS dtd_identifier,
!CAST('NO' AS character_data) AS is_self_referencing,
! 
!col_description(a.attrelid, a.attnum) AS column_comment
  
  FROM (pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef ad ON attrelid = adrelid AND attnum = 
adnum),
   pg_class c, pg_namespace nc, pg_user u,

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[HACKERS] [Fwd: Re: Interesting thought....]

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Wasn't sure if this is a valid idea, but Bruce's response made me think it was worth forwarding here to see if anyone had/has considered it before.

As everyone is aware, I'm not up for coding it, but am mentioning it Just In Case it's deemed worthy of adding to the TODO list in case someone wants to pick up.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

 Original Message 
Subject: Re: Interesting thought
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 14:13:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bruce Momjian [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Justin Clift [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This would fix all our inheritance problems, and allow sequences to span
multiple tables with an index constraint
---

Justin Clift wrote:
Hi Bruce,

Here's an interesting thought

Multi-table indexes... like multi-column, but instead of specifying columns in one table, they specify columns in several tables.

That leads into thoughts about multi-table primary and secondary keys and multi-table foreign keys too.

Wonder if it'd be useful in the real world?  I reckon so.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--
  Bruce Momjian|  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive, |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.|  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073
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Re: [HACKERS] Two weeks to feature freeze

[Justin Clift]

The Hermit Hacker wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Andrew Dunstan wrote:


Maybe a better strategy would be to get a release out soon but not wait
6 months for another release which would contain the Win32 port and the
PITR stuff (assuming those aren't done in time for this release).
Just a thought.


And definitely in agreement here ... I'd rather see a shortened dev cycle
prompted by a big feature being added, then delaying a release because oh
oh, I need another few weeks that draws out when something unexpected
happens :(
Yep, this makes sense.  Looks like it'll be PostgreSQL 7.4 being all the 
present improvements, but without PITR and Win32.  Then, in a few months 
(hopefully less than 3) we'll have PostgreSQL 8.0, with both of those 
major features in it (and whatever other enhancements have been added).

The only thing that makes me wince is that we have a protocol change at 
PostgreSQL 7.4 release instead of 8.0.  It kind of doesn't sound right, 
having a protocol change in the 7 series, when we have an 8 series 
coming up soon after.

Oh well, so it's not perfect...

;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

snip

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[HACKERS] [Fwd: [GENERAL] [CYGWIN] Problems compiling PostgreSQL 7.3.3-1 underWin98]

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Can anyone assist Diogo here?  He's not some random user, he's our 
official Portuguese translator and helps us out a lot.  Sounds like he 
really needs a hand.

*please*

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

 Original Message 
Subject: [GENERAL] [CYGWIN] Problems compiling PostgreSQL 7.3.3-1 under 
Win98
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:51:55 -0300
From: Diogo de Oliveira Biazus [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Hi everybody,

I'm having some problems compiling PostgreSQL 7.3.3-1 under Win98,
when the gcc is compiling the pg_sema.c in the src/backend/port
directory gcc exit with error.
There are lots of warnings about undeclered stuff (like
IpcSemaphoreGetValue) and a message in the end saying: Storage size of
'sops' insn't known
I'm compiling because I need the libpostgres.a file to build some
extensions, is there any other way of doing that?
I've already posted this message in pgsql-cygwin, sory for the cross-post.
Please, somebody help me.
Thanks in advance,

--
Diogo de Oliveira Biazus
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ikono Sistemas e Automao
http://www.ikono.com.br


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Re: [HACKERS] Translation

[Justin Clift]

Hi,

Bingo, count yourself in.  :)

Is your preference for translation of website related stuff (i.e. 
http://advocacy.postgresql.org), or existing manuals and documentation, 
or error messages in the code itself, or ...? (up to you)

Translating some of the web materials into Slovak would open up a 
completely new community to PostgreSQL, if you wouldn't mind doing that.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

P.M wrote:

Hi,

Ok so if i can't help you in the code, maybe i can
help you translating installation comments into
several languages ?
I know, french, slovak, spanish..

;-)

__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
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Re: [HACKERS] Compiling Win32

[Justin Clift]

Hi Jan,

Do you have an ETA for this?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Bruce Momjian wrote:

I have not tested the Win32 compile in a few weeks, so it is possible it
is broken at this point.  It will not run because we need exec()
handling that Jan is working on, and signal stuff.




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Re: [HACKERS] Compiling Win32

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:

Hi Jan,

Do you have an ETA for this?
I was going to report the Win32 status this week.  As you know, I had to
leave Win32 to catch up on email.  The two big items left are exec()
handlling and signals.  If I can get those in by July 1, I can continue
cleanup during beta and perhaps have a patch that people can test for
Win32 later in the summer.
Ok, how does that leave our status for the next release of PostgreSQL?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift



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Re: [HACKERS] Compiling Win32

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:

Bruce Momjian wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:


Hi Jan,

Do you have an ETA for this?
I was going to report the Win32 status this week.  As you know, I had to
leave Win32 to catch up on email.  The two big items left are exec()
handlling and signals.  If I can get those in by July 1, I can continue
cleanup during beta and perhaps have a patch that people can test for
Win32 later in the summer.
Ok, how does that leave our status for the next release of PostgreSQL?


Wish I knew --- I am realizing that I have trouble doing major
development and keeping up with patches/email.
Heh Heh Heh

That's what it was like when I started doing the Techdocs site.  Had to 
shelve my plans for doing coding, purely because 16 hours a days still 
didn't leave any time for it.

:(

Worth looking into delegating some of your workload?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift





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Re: [HACKERS] PostgreSQL under Windows

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Although the Proof of Concept build works, it does have a few drawbacks:

 + Only works on English (US at least) installations, because it's hard 
coded to install in C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL.  On non-English 
installations, C:\Program Files is named differently and causes things 
to fail.

 + It's missing the pager program less, and the gzip libraries, so 
using pg_dump and psql have problems.

 + It's based on an old version of PostgreSQL, 7.3.1 from memory.

All that being said, it should be ok to use, but don't run it in a 
production environment.  Development and testing environments should be ok.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Robert Treat wrote:
On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 08:03, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 22:34:04 -0700,
 P.M [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I was thinking that PostgreSQL could help me to reduce
the cost of a such software. But i would like to know
what is the status of the PostGreSQL version under
Windows ?
I mean, i know that some of you are trying to do an
installer version under Windows for PostGreSQL and i
would like to know if a beta version already exist or
not
There will be a beta native windows port available in about 3 weeks.
It is currently possible to run postgresql on windows using cygwin.


If you don't want to wait and not big on cygwin, you can get a proof of
concept build at 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9764release_id=136623

It's not supported by anyone and I can't even say if it will work for
you, but it has worked for some in the past and might be a good way to
get your feet wet. 

Once you get up and running be sure to come back and help us beta test!
:-)
Robert Treat




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Re: [HACKERS] Proposal to Re-Order Postgresql.Conf, part II

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Josh Berkus [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

wal_debug is seldom used outside of Postgresql source development or unusual 
system failures, and should therefore go last.
BTW, it occurs to me that wal_debug is one of the hacker-only variables
that probably ought not be documented at all.  I cannot imagine any use
for it for the average DBA.
Um, not documenting it is probably not a good move for us, however putting it at the end in a section marked Developer Focused or something similar would 
probably have the right mix of messages.  i.e. hands off + not a performance tweak, etc.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


			regards, tom lane

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--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi
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Re: [HACKERS] Wrong version of jdbc in 7.3.3 rpms

[Justin Clift]

Barry Lind wrote:
Does anyone know why apparently the 7.3beta1 version of the jdbc drivers 
are what is included in the 7.3.3 rpms?
No idea.

Just updated the PostgreSQL Release Process document though in case anyone (Marc) ever decides they're going to use it:

http://advocacy.postgresql.org/documents/ReleaseProcess

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--Barry

 Original Message 
Subject: Re: [JDBC] Official JDBC driver release ?
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 08:14:40 +0200
From: Thomas Kellerer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
References: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Barry Lind schrieb:

I'm a bit puzzled about the versions of the JDBC driver floating around.

I initially downloaded the release for 7.3 from jdbc.postgresql.org

Now I have seen that the JDBC driver which is included e.g. in the 
RPM's for 7.3.3 is a bit older and has a different name 
(pg73b1jdbc3.jar vs. pg73jdbc3.jar)


The pg73b1jdbc3.jar file is very old (it is the 7.3 beta 1 version). 
What RPMs are you using?  You should contact whoever produced those 
RPMs to get them built with the current version.  The 'official' 
version is the source code that is tagged with the 7.3.3 freeze label 
(which is the version that is currently posted on the 
jdbc.postgresql.org web site)

--Barry
Barry,

thanks for the answer.

The pg73b1jdbc3.jar file is contained in all the 7.3.3 rpm available on
the ftp mirrors... (ok, not necessarilly all, but I checked about 3 or 4
different mirrors)
I don't know who builds the rpms on the mirror sites available from
www.postgresql.org
Cheers
Thomas


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--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi
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Re: [HACKERS] 7.3.2 make failed on AIX4.3 using native c compiler

[Justin Clift]

Hi John,

Marco Pratesi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote a step-by-step guide for compiling 
PostgreSQL on AIX a while ago:

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/CompilingForAIX

Hope that helps.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

John Liu wrote:
I config and make the 7.3.2 on
the one works, then try to install
on the other one which was failed, after
the install, try to start postmaster -
tail -f postmaster.log
exec(): 0509-036 Cannot load program /emrxdbs/pgsql/bin/postmaster because
of the following errors:
Dependent module /usr/local/lib/libz.a(shr.o) could not be loaded.
Member shr.o is not found in archive
But the failed one, libz.a is older
working one -
ls -all /usr/local/lib/libz.a
-rw-r--r--   1 root system 77308 Mar 20 2000  /usr/local/lib/libz.a
failed one -
ls -all /usr/local/lib/libz.a
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root system 83699 Feb 19 2001  /usr/local/lib/libz.a
johnl


-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Liu
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 11:24 AM
To: Bruce Momjian
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] 7.3.2 make failed on AIX4.3 using native c
compiler
Hi, Bruce,
I've tried on two AIX4.3.3 boxes,
both are the same oslevel=4330-09,
both are the same compiler version,
lslpp -l|grep -i xlc
 xlC.aix43.rte  4.0.2.1  COMMITTED  C Set ++ Runtime for AIX
4.3
 xlC.cpp4.3.0.1  COMMITTED  C for AIX Preprocessor
 xlC.msg.en_US.cpp  4.3.0.1  COMMITTED  C for AIX Preprocessor
 xlC.msg.en_US.rte  4.0.2.0  COMMITTED  C Set ++ Runtime
 xlC.rte4.0.2.0  COMMITTED  C Set ++ Runtime
one make works, the other one failed. I'm trying
to figure out what makes the differences.
johnl

-Original Message-
From: Bruce Momjian [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 11:15 AM
To: John Liu
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] 7.3.2 make failed on AIX4.3 using native c
compiler


I know we have other AIX users using PostgreSQL. What compiler version
is that?
--
-
John Liu wrote:

make[4]: Leaving directory
`/emrxdbs/postgresql-7.3.2/src/backend/parser'

cc -O2 -qmaxmem=16384 -qsrcmsg -qlonglong
-I../../../src/interfaces/libpq -I

../../../src/include -I/usr/local/include
-DBINDIR=\/emrxdbs/pgsql/bin\  -

c -o pg_dump.o pg_dump.c
2681 |  COMMENT, deps,
   a
a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
2777 |

COMMENT,

deps,

a
a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
2795 |

COMMENT,

deps,

a
a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
3121 |  tinfo-usename,
TYPE, deps,

.a

a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
3226 |  tinfo-usename,
DOMAIN, deps,

...a

a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
3515 |
PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE,

deps,

a
a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
3882 |  CAST, deps,
   .a
a - 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types
const unsigned

char*(*)[] and unsigned char*(*)[] is not allowed.
cc -O2 -qmaxmem=16384 -qsrcmsg -qlonglong
-I../../../src/interfaces/libpq -I

../../../src/include -I/usr/local/include
-DBINDIR=\/emrxdbs/pgsql/bin\  -

c -o common.o common.c
cc -O2 -qmaxmem=16384 -qsrcmsg -qlonglong
-I../../../src/interfaces/libpq -I

../../../src/include -I/usr/local/include
-DBINDIR=\/emrxdbs/pgsql/bin\  -

c -o pg_backup_archiver.o pg_backup_archiver.c
 590 | ArchiveEntry(Archive *AHX,  char *oid,  char *tag,
   a.
a - 1506-343 (S) Redeclaration of ArchiveEntry differs from previous
declaration on line 135 of pg_backup.h.
a - 1506-377 (I) The type unsigned char*(*)[] of parameter 7
differs from

the previous type const unsigned char*(*)[].
make[3]: *** [pg_backup_archiver.o] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/emrxdbs/postgresql-7.3.2/src/bin/pg_dump'
make[2

Re: [HACKERS] Numbering of the next release: 8.0 vs 7.4

[Justin Clift]

mlw wrote:
snip
So, if the decision is to go with an 8.0, what would you guys say to 
having a roll call about stuff that is possible and practical and 
really design PostgreSQL 8.0 as something fundimentally newer than 
7.x. 8.0 could get the project some hype. It has been 7x for so many 
years.
Sounds great.  I just don't want it to take _ages_ to accomplish.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi
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Re: [HACKERS] Numbering of the next release: 8.0 vs 7.4

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Lamar Owen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

FWIW, the 6.4 protocol change didn't force a move from 6.3.2 to 7.0.


True, but that was a much smaller change than what we're contemplating
here.  AFAIR, those changes did not affect the majority of applications
--- they only needed to relink with a newer client library, and voila
they spoke the new protocol perfectly well.  The planned changes for
error handling (error codes, etc) will be something that will affect
almost every app.  They won't *need* to change, maybe, but they'll
probably *want* to change.
But let's wait till feature freeze to have this discussion; we'll know
better by then exactly what we're talking about.
Yep, that sounds like the best idea.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


			regards, tom lane


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi
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[HACKERS] Numbering of the next release: 8.0 vs 7.4

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Thinking about the numbering further.

Would it be cool to decide on the version numbering of our next release 
like this:

 + If it looks like we'll have Win32 and/or PITR recovery in time for
   the next release, we call it PostgreSQL 8.0
 + If not, we call it 7.4

Win32 and PITR are great big features that will take us a long way to 
the goal of Enterprise suitability.  They're worth making some specific 
marketing/branding efforts about and making a big fuss, that why I'd 
like to see them in an 8.0 release.

Sound feasible?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi
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Re: [HACKERS] Numbering of the next release: 8.0 vs 7.4

[Justin Clift]

Paul Ramsey wrote:
Justin Clift wrote:

Win32 and PITR are great big features that will take us a long way to 
the goal of Enterprise suitability.  They're worth making some 
specific marketing/branding efforts about and making a big fuss, that 
why I'd like to see them in an 8.0 release.
 From a marketing point of view, wouldn't it be better to skip that 
risky point-O release and go straight to version 8.1? :)
Err... lets not get into deceptive marketing.  ;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

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Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] division by zero

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
snip
FWIW, this also is a problem with some of the windows ports.  For
example, 'select 0/0' is unpredictable and can cause the server to gpf
and restart.  This does not include the SRA port, because I don't have
it.
I just tested the SRA Win32 threaded port and both SELECT 1/0 and SELECT
0/0 crash the process.  I have reported this to Tatsuo.
Reported the issue to the Apple guys earlier on today, but haven't heard 
anything back from them yet.

Guess we'll have to wait a few days to find out where things are at in 
regards to MacOS X.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
- Original Message -
From: Dave Page [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...
I'd be happy to do this if it hasn't been done. After a quick perusal of the
script I think it would be very straightforward.
Sounds like the who is going to do this needs to be sorted out. 
PeerDirect and SRA have already done this, Peter has started on it as 
well, etc.

Perhaps Peter should integrate the patches from PeerDirect or SRA, as 
he'll be most familiar with the code and it'll then take that bit of 
work off Bruce's plate?

It's just a thought anyway...  :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


cheers

andrew


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Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip
One way to tamp down expectations of client backwards compatibility
would be to call the release 8.0 instead of 7.4 ;-)
Comments?
Actually, I've been thinking about the numbering of the next PostgreSQL 
version for a few days now.

The scenario that's appealing to me the most is this for the next release:

PostgreSQL 8.0
**
+ Includes PITR and the Win32 port

+ Not sure where Satoshi is up to with his 2 phase commit proposal, but 
that might make sense to incorporate into a wire protocol revision. 
From memory he received funding to work on it, so it might be coming 
along nicely.

+ Other things optional of course.

Personally, I'd rather we go for PostgreSQL 8.0, waiting a while extra 
for PITR and Win32 if needed, and also properly co-ordinate all of the 
release process information (website updates, package builds, Announce 
to the mailing lists and news sources).

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

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Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
snip
So, what should we do?  Should we go another month or two and just wait
until we have enough must-have features?  While not waiting on specific
features, it _is_ waiting for something to warrant a release.  I guess
the big question is whether we release on a scheduled-basis or a
enough-features-basis.
Hmmm, I feel we should decide on features that will make an 8.0 release 
meaningful, and *somehow* work to making sure they are ready for the 
release.

With 7.1/7.2, Tom mentioned us being delayed because specific features 
we were waiting for became dependant on one person.

Would it be feasible to investigate approaches for having the Win32 and 
PITR work be shared amongst a few very-interested volunteers, so that 
people can cover for each other's downtime?  Not sure of the 
confidentiality level of the Win32/PITR patches at present, but I'd 
guess there would be at least a few solid volunteers willing to 
contribute to the Win32/PITR ports if we asked for people to step forwards.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Dave Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

What about the addition of pg_attribute.attrelid 
pg_attribute.attname/attnum in RowDesription messages to identify the
underlying attribute (where appropriate)?
Well, we can talk about it, but I still think that any frontend that
relies on such information is broken by design.  (And if that means the
JDBC spec is broken, then the JDBC spec is broken.)
Just to start with, if I do SELECT * FROM view, am I going to see the
info associated with the view column, or with the hypothetical
underlying table column?  (Actually, didn't I already make a list of a
bunch of ways in which this concept is underspecified?  AFAIR, you
didn't suggest answers to any of those questions ... but we need answers
to all of them if we are going to implement the feature.)
The problem Dave is suggesting this as a first attempt at a solution for 
is that with ODBC, a frontend (i.e. OpenOffice) asks the ODBC driver 
which columns are NULLable, etc.  And the ODBC driver is getting the 
info wrong, then passing back the incorrect info.

So, when a person goes to insert a row into a table with a 
SERIAL/SEQUENCE based column, OpenOffice has been told the column isn't 
NULLable and forces the user to enter a value.  Voila, it doesn't work 
with sequences.  :(

It's likely possible to add to the ODBC driver some way of getting the 
info right, but Dave is also looking for a way of making this easier 
into the future for similar problems.  i.e. Let the database explicitly 
have info about what each column can do.

That's my understanding of it anyway.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


			regards, tom lane


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Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

As a thought, has anyone considered if it's worth doing data compression 
of the new proposed protocol for PostgreSQL 8.0/7.4?  It was suggested 
a long time ago by Joshua Drake (and his version was well accepted by 
his customers from what I heard), so might this be worth adding too?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Justin Clift [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

The scenario that's appealing to me the most is this for the next release:
PostgreSQL 8.0
+ Includes PITR and the Win32 port
If the folks doing those things can get done in time, great.  I'm even
willing to push out the release schedule (now, not later) to make it
more likely they can get done.  What I'm not willing to do is define
the release in terms of it happens when these things are done.  We
learned the folly of that approach in 7.1 and 7.2.  Setting a target
date and sticking to it works *much* better.
Yep, we both seem to be saying that we'd like these features, but we 
don't want to see them become delay-points.


+ Not sure where Satoshi is up to with his 2 phase commit proposal, but 
that might make sense to incorporate into a wire protocol revision. 
I can't see any need for protocol-level support for such a thing.
Why wouldn't it just be some more SQL commands?
Not sure.  It seems like 2PC will be required/desirable within the year 
for better support of some clustering scenarios, so we might as well 
look at it now.  When I was reading Satoshi's stuff a while ago I 
thought it was a protcol level thing, not a SQL command level thing, but 
don't really care either way.  :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


(Not that I believe in 2PC as a real-world solution anyway, but that's
a different argument...)
			regards, tom lane


--
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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Dave Page wrote:
It's rumoured that Justin Clift once said:

There's more to making PostgreSQL work on Windows than just the pure
packaging issues.  We still have to figure out how we're going to
handle stuff like needed grep, sed, etc just for PostgreSQL to run
(they're required by initdb).
I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...
I heard Peter mention that, but my email seems to be a tad spotty and I 
haven't come across the rest of the conversation about it.

That would be really good of course, as it reduces the external 
dependencies.  :)


We're also going to need to have a good idea of what other nice
features  could/should be packaged along with it.  i.e.:
+ a GUI to control some things (installation/deinstallation of the
  PostgreSQL Service, perhaps vacuuming, etc).


Hang on, I heard of a good one the other day... :-)
There's a couple of potentials.  ;-)


+ Shortcuts in the Program menu to things (PostgreSQL website(s),
  online documentation, etc)
Those are just decisions to make aren't they? They don't require a Cygwin
proof of concept.
Sure.  But I hadn't thought about them until building the cygwin proof 
of concept.  Think of it as a test run to see what kind of things it 
brought to mind.  :)

Another thing is the international support.  The Proof of Concept 
version was a bad hack in that it forced installation into C:\Program 
Files\PostgreSQL.  For non-english versions of Windows, they have 
C:\Program Files being names to other things, dependant on the 
language.  This broke the installation of course.  :(

With a proper installer (as you've mentioned), that shouldn't be a 
problem as it should automatically install into the correct PostgreSQL 
subdirectory of whatever the equivalent of Program Files is, on 
whatever drive.  Registry entries (if used) should properly match of course.


+ Which parts of the installation should be mandatory, and which
should
  be optional.  i.e. Base server files should be mandatory, HTML docs
  should be optional, perhaps include the ODBC driver as optional too.
Likewise, these are decisions to make and then suitable programming of the
installer. Making bits optional should be trivial in any good installer.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that someone has finally built a
good Cygwin based package - I just don't think it answers many of the
issues that we will likely encounter.
No, but it brought some of them to light.  :)


Regards, Dave.

PS. Is the source on the ftpsite - if not you'll have Jason after you
before long :-)
The source?  It's the standard version of cygwin.  It's just packaged 
differently.  :)

The packaging scripts themselves though have gone into the ether 
forever, as the drive they were on was lost a few weeks ago (rebooted 
one day and it didn't come back).  :(  If absolutely needed, we could 
reverse engineer them back from the installation package. (painful)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] division by zero

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Was just looking around Google for similar reports of errors and came 
across this:

MacOS X Server Developer Release Notes: Core OS Runtime
http://www.geminisolutions.com/WebObjects_4.5/Documentation/Developer/YellowBox/ReleaseNotes/Runtime.html
Looks like this is a known problem (as of 1998) and may not have been fixed.

Further hits come up when searching on the Apple Developer Connection 
site too:

http://developer.apple.com/cgi-bin/search.pl?q=divide+by+zeronum=10lang=lang_en|lang_zh-CN|lang_fr|lang_de|lang_jaie=utf8oe=utf8
(that should be all one line)
And this one looks potentially interesting:

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2053.html
(search in this page for FE_ENABLE_DIVBYZERO)
Have asked the member of the Apple MacOS X Server team what he 
recommends the best way to proceed is.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Eric B.Ridge wrote:
On Saturday, March 8, 2003, at 11:54  PM, Justin Clift wrote:

Tom Lane wrote:
snip
2. Consider this Apple's problem and file a bug report.


Is there a good place to report errors to Apple for this kind of thing?


The best place I can find is:  
http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/index.html

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to query existing 
reports... If there is, I can't find it.

Also, I can't help but wonder why Apple/DarwinTeam handle integer 
division by zero this way.  There must be a reason, which makes me think 
that [considering] this Apple's problem might not work out for 
postgres in the end.

eric



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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Merlin Moncure wrote:
Justin Clift wrote:
snip
The timestamp of the file on the ftp server is 1/28/03.  The timestamp
of file I previously dl'd (which I collected from whatever link you
posted on this list) is 2/3/03.  However I downloaded the older version
and they are the same (same number of bytes, at least).
That's cool, it's probably just that the timestamp wasn't correctly 
carried onto the FTP server.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Merlin


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[HACKERS] OT: The first GCC Developers Summit

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Just came across the website for the first GCC Developers Summit, to 
be held May 25-27, 2003.

http://www.gccsummit.org/2003/

Might be of interest to some people here.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Merlin Moncure wrote:
This is the 'proof of concept' cygwin windows build.  Strangely, I have
a newer build than the one on the ftp server.  Is there a binary version
of postgres with Jan's patch available?
Uh Oh.

When you say newer version, what gives the feeling of it being newer?

In the Proof of Concept Windows series, there's only been that first 
build.  It's going to take some time for the next one as well, as the 
Win2K PC it was developed on had a problem and had to wipe the hard 
drive.  (i.e. all of the packaging scripts, data, etc).  :-/

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Merlin


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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
What is this build, exactly?  It is Jan's patch brough up to 7.3, or cygwin?
It's a simplified installation package of 7.3.1 with cygwin.  Put it 
together so we can get a feel for the packaging issues we'll need to 
take into account for the proper release of a 7.4 Windows version.

Getting the next version out the door is taking a bit more time than 
anticipated though.  :(

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] ETA for PostgreSQL 7.3.3?

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
Feels like we've been isolating a whole bunch of bugs in 7.3.2 recently,
some of which are causing crashes out in the real world.
Wondering when we feel it'd be good to start assembling a 7.3.3?  I'm
thinking in about two weeks or so, to give a bit more time to catch bugs
and stuff.
I really should fix this rowtype problem for 7.3.3 - here's hoping I find
some time...
Agreed.  I wish time could be purchased in bottles.  Reckon we could 
all get together and put in wholesale orders!

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Chris


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[HACKERS] Postgresql.org site outage

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Just received notification the server hosting the postgresql.org 
websites suffered a catastrophic failure a few hours ago.

The admin guys are working to fix it, but it could take at least another 
8 hours (no guarantee's here).

No more detailed info at present, but will keep everyone posted as 
things progress.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
Justin Clift writes:

Yep, that's the first Proof of Concept build, and it *prominently* has
a message at the start of the installation that says to email me with
any problems about it.
Maybe a so-called Proof of Concept build could be put into an area on
the FTP server that conveys that fact in the directory names (like test
or contrib or whatever).  Because those who need a more production-grade
build will likely confuse this.
That's probably not a bad idea.

It has warnings *all over it* (main window title, big warning messages 
during the install, etc), but we know from experience that some people 
don't read anything and just click the Next button until things finish.

Marc, what do you feel?  How about a testing or development or 
similar base directory on the website to put testing releases?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
snip
How about putting a README file in that directory as well, giving out 
the same warnings and contact information that appears upon install?
Thanks Greg, excellent suggestion.

Just added it to my personal ToDo list.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


- --
Greg Sabino Mullane [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200303061015


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Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

[Justin Clift]

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
Justin put them up, but I believe that any bug reports for them should be
sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ...
Yep, that's the first Proof of Concept build, and it *prominently* has 
a message at the start of the installation that says to email me with 
any problems about it.

I'm open to suggestions for making a more visible way for people to know 
how to contact us, if needed.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Peter Eisentraut wrote:


There are Windows binaries on the PostgreSQL FTP server mirrors, for
example,
http://ftp.de.postgresql.org/mirror/postgresql/binary/v7.3.1/Windows/

that users are having problems with.  Apparently there is no name or
address of any creator available.  So who did this and would like to fix
the packaging?
--
Peter Eisentraut   [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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[HACKERS] ETA for PostgreSQL 7.3.3?

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Feels like we've been isolating a whole bunch of bugs in 7.3.2 recently, 
some of which are causing crashes out in the real world.

Wondering when we feel it'd be good to start assembling a 7.3.3?  I'm 
thinking in about two weeks or so, to give a bit more time to catch bugs 
and stuff.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] Yet another open-source benchmark

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
OSDL has just come out with a set of open-source database benchmarks:
http://www.osdl.org/projects/performance/
The bad news:
This tool kit works with SAP DB open source database versions 7.3.0.23
or 7.3.0.25.
(In fact, they seem to think they are testing kernel performance, not
database performance, which strikes me as rather bizarre.  But anyway.)
The good news:
We are planning to port this test kit to other databases.
Perhaps someone around here should help out...
Yep, this is the group that have hit a performance limit with SAPDB and 
are 100% definitely looking to move it to PostgreSQL, *if* they can get 
people to assist them.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

			regards, tom lane

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Re: [HACKERS] ILIKE

[Justin Clift]

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
Tom Lane writes:

My feeling too.  Whatever you may think of its usefulness, it's been a
documented feature since 7.1.  It's a bit late to reconsider.
It's never too late for new users to reconsider.  It's also never too late
to change your application of performance is not satisfactory.
Well, ILIKE has been a feature for quite some time and the amount of 
negative feedback we've been receiving about upgrade problems makes me 
feel that _removing_ it would be detrimental.  (i.e. broken applications)

As an alternative to _removing_ it, would a feasible idea be to 
transparently alias it to something else, say a specific type of regex 
query or something?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] [GENERAL] Open Source Development Lab resources

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Had an interesting conversation earlier on today with Timothy Witham 
from the Open Source Development Lab (important place sponsored by IBM, 
HP, CA, etc) earlier on today.  They've been basing their database 
performance suites on SAPDB, but are having problems with it and looking 
to move to a better database.

This is an opportunity for us to get a lot of corporate-acceptable 
testing and similar done, if there are a few people willing to help out.

Am very much interested in people's thoughts on this, and especially 
hoping that some people are willing to get together and get the needed 
bits done.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

***

 Original Message 
Subject: Re: OSDLabs and PostgreSQL
Date: 19 Feb 2003 14:18:30 -0800
From: Timothy D. Witham [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Organization: Open Source Development Lab, Inc.
To: Justin Clift [EMAIL PROTECTED]
References: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Further thoughts, I think that we have hit a wall with
our progress with SAPDB on the performance front.
  If you would check out the performance pages on
the three database tests. These are fair use
subsets of the TPC W,C and H benchmarks and they
are open source. (www.osdl.org/projects/performance)
  I will be blunt with you.  If we had somebody
who was willing to:
1) Work on getting the kits ported over.
2) Work on performance issues we discovered
3) Work on enhancements that would help
   in both the real world and these tests
  I would be willing to move all of our work over
to that RDBMS. Our goal is to make the overall
infrastructure better and I think that we could
do that working with just one database but we
have to get the support from those database
developers.
Tim

***

Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
FYI...

I recently attended a presentation by the director of the Open Source
Development Lab (www.osdl.org).  Apparently they have two things that
are useful to open-source database developers:
a) some ongoing work to make nice database test suites for benchmarking

b) lots of hardware available for *free* for testing

All you have to do is sign up.  I'm about five minutes from the site,
so if there's anything that needs to be done physically there, I'm
game.  But generally, it's all handled remote anyway.
Did I say they have lots of hardware?  Big disk arrays.  2-way, up to
32-way(!) processor setups.  Fast pipes to the net.
Did I say free?  As long as you're working on open source stuff, you
can take a number.
Neat.

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] request for sql3 compliance for the update command

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
Dave Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Ok, if a patch were submitted to the parser to allow the syntax in
question would it be considered?


I would vote against it ... but that's only one vote.
As a thought, will it add significant maintenance penalties or be 
detrimental?

There seem to be quite a lot of Informix people moving to PostgreSQL 
these days, moreso than Oracle shops.  Might have been brought on by 
IBM's purchase of Informix.

Wondering if this one change be a significant improvement in regards to 
making it easier to migrate, or just a minor thing?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


			regards, tom lane
--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: FW: [HACKERS] Changing the default configuration (was Re:

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Just looked on the IBM website for info relating to shared memory and 
IPC limits in AIX, and found a few useful-looking documents:

The Interprocess Communication (IPC) Overview
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0context=SWG10q=shmgetuid=aix15f11dd1d98f3551f85256816006a001dloc=en_UScs=utf-8cc=uslang=en#1.1
This document defines the interprocess communication (IPC) and is 
applicable to AIX versions 3.2.x and 4.x.

Lots of the stuff here is very intro-level, but some still looks useful.


vmtune Parameters
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0context=SWG10q=shmgetuid=aix16934e2f123d4ab3785256816006a0252loc=en_UScs=utf-8cc=uslang=en
This document discusses the vmtune  command used to modify the Virtual 
Memory Manager (VMM) parameters that control the behavior of the memory 
management subsystem. This information applies to AIX Versions 4.x.


And an obscure reference to the AIX shmget(2) manpage says that there is 
a non-tunable maximum shared-memory segment size of 256MB:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/780/mcx/workstation.html#aix

Hope some of this is useful.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] Real-world usage example

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Badger wrote:
snip

There have been a number of people comment on how PostgreSQL performs as
a StORE repository - some good comments, some not so good.  Either way,
given the varied use of StORE, the feedback may yield valuable
information.

The place to look for feedback from StORE users is the news group
comp.lang.smalltalk.  For example:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=postgres+group:comp.lang.smalltalkhl=enlr=ie=UTF-8oe=UTF-8scoring=d

I hope this is useful.


Yep, it definitely is.  We're looking for places to be PostgreSQL Case 
Studies at present, so it's probably worth Carol Ioanni (CC'd, she's 
becoming our Case Study Expert) to join that mailing list and ask there.

Thanks heaps Bruce.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


All the best,
	Bruce

BTW, I wrote the PostgreSQL driver for VisualWorks Smalltalk which is
how all StORE + PostgreSQL users access their databases.


--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Brain dump: btree collapsing

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip

The deletion procedure could be triggered immediately upon removal of the
last item in a page, or when the next VACUUM scan finds an empty page.
Not sure yet which way is better.


Having it triggered immediately upon removal of the last item in a page 
would make for a more self maintaining system wouldn't it?  That 
sounds nice.  :)

snip
In theory, if we find recyclable page(s) at the physical end of the index,
we could truncate the file (ie, give the space back to the filesystem)
instead of reporting these pages to FSM.  I am not sure if this is worth
doing --- in most cases it's likely that little space can be released this
way, and there may be some tricky locking issues.


Sounds like this would be beneficial for environments with high 
update/delete transaction volumes, perhaps on smaller amounts of 
live/valid data.


snip
This could be ignored in first implementation (there's always REINDEX).
Later, possibly handle it via LaninShasha's notion of a critic (think
VACUUM) that sets a fast pointer to the current effective root level.
(Actually I think we wouldn't need a separate critic process; split and
delete steps could be programmed to update the fast pointer for
themselves, in a separate atomic action, when they split a one-page level
or delete the next-to-last page of a level.)


This really sounds like good initial thoughts too.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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Re: [HACKERS] Changing the default configuration (was Re: [pgsql-advocacy]

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip

What I would really like to do is set the default shared_buffers to
1000.  That would be 8 meg worth of shared buffer space.  Coupled with
more-realistic settings for FSM size, we'd probably be talking a shared
memory request approaching 16 meg.  This is not enough RAM to bother
any modern machine from a performance standpoint, but there are probably
quite a few platforms out there that would need an increase in their
stock SHMMAX kernel setting before they'd take it.

snip

Totally agree with this.  We really, really, really, really need to get 
the default to a point where we have _decent_ default performance.

The alternative approach is to leave the settings where they are, and
to try to put more emphasis in the documentation on the fact that the
factory-default settings produce a toy configuration that you *must*
adjust upward for decent performance.  But we've not had a lot of
success spreading that word, I think.  With SHMMMAX too small, you
do at least get a pretty specific error message telling you so.

Comments?


Yep.

Here's an *unfortunately very common* scenario, that again 
unfortunately, a _seemingly large_ amount of people fall for.

a) Someone decides to benchmark database XYZ vs PostgreSQL vs other 
databases

b) Said benchmarking person knows very little about PostgreSQL, so they 
install the RPM's, packages, or whatever, and it works.  Then they run 
whatever benchmark they've downloaded, or designed, or whatever

c) PostgreSQL, being practically unconfigured, runs at the pace of a 
slow, mostly-disabled snail.

d) Said benchmarking person gets better performance from the other 
databases (also set to their default settings) and thinks PostgreSQL 
has lots of features, and it's free, but it's Too Slow.

Yes, this kind of testing shouldn't even _pretend_ to have any real 
world credibility.

e) Said benchmarking person tells everyone they know, _and_ everyone 
they meet about their results.  Some of them even create nice looking or 
profesional looking web pages about it.

f) People who know even _less_ than the benchmarking person hear about 
the test, or read the result, and don't know any better than to believe 
it at face value.  So, they install whatever system was recommended.

g) Over time, the benchmarking person gets the hang of their chosen 
database more and writes further articles about it, and doesn't 
generally look any further afield than it for say... a couple of years. 
 By this time, they've already influenced a couple of thousand people 
in the non-optimal direction.

h) Arrgh.  With better defaults, our next release would _appear_ to be a 
lot faster to quite a few people, just because they have no idea about 
tuning.

So, as sad as this scenario is, better defaults will probably encourage 
a lot more newbies to get involved, and that'll eventually translate 
into a lot more experienced users, and a few more coders to assist.  ;-)

Personally I'd be a bunch happier if we set the buffers so high that we 
definitely have decent performance, and the people that want to run 
PostgreSQL are forced to make the choice of either:

 1) Adjust their system settings to allow PostgreSQL to run properly, or

 2) Manually adjust the PostgreSQL settings to run memory-constrained

This way, PostgreSQL either runs decently, or they are _aware_ that 
they're limiting it.  That should cut down on the false benchmarks 
(hopefully).

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

			regards, tom lane



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Re: [HACKERS] Changing the default configuration (was Re: [pgsql-advocacy]

[Justin Clift]

Josh Berkus wrote:

Tom, Justin,

snip


What if we supplied several sample .conf files, and let the user choose which 
to copy into the database directory?   We could have a high read 
performance profile, and a transaction database profile, and a 
workstation profile, and a low impact profile.   We could even supply a 
Perl script that would adjust SHMMAX and SHMMALL on platforms where this can 
be done from the command line.


This might have value as the next step in the process of:

a) Are we going to have better defaults?

or

b) Let's stick with the current approach.


If we decide to go with better (changed) defaults, we may also be able 
to figure out a way of having profiles that could optionally be chosen from.

As a longer term thought, it would be nice if the profiles weren't just 
hard-coded example files, but more of:

pg_autotune --setprofile=xxx

Or similar utility, and it did all the work.  Named profiles being one 
capability, and other tuning measurements (i.e. cpu costings, disk 
performance profiles, etc) being the others.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Changing the default configuration (was Re: [pgsql-advocacy]

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip

Uh ... do we have a basis for recommending any particular sets of
parameters for these different scenarios?  This could be a good idea
in the abstract, but I'm not sure I know enough to fill in the details.

A lower-tech way to accomplish the same result is to document these
alternatives in postgresql.conf comments and encourage people to review
that file, as Steve Crawford just suggested.  But first we need the raw
knowledge.


Without too much hacking around, you could pretty easily adapt the 
pg_autotune code to do proper profiles of a system with different settings.

i.e. increment one setting at a time, run pgbench on it with some decent 
amount of transactions and users, stuff the results into a different 
database.  Aggregate data over time kind of thing.  Let it run for a 
week, etc.

If it's helpful, there's a 100% spare Althon 1.6Ghz box around with 
(choose your OS) + Adaptec 29160 + 512MB RAM + 2 x 9GB Seagate Cheetah 
10k rpm drives hanging around.  No stress to set that up and let it run 
any long terms tests you'd like plus send back results.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

			regards, tom lane



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Re: [HACKERS] PostgreSQL, NetBSD and NFS

[Justin Clift]

James Hubbard wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:


Hmmm... does anyone remember the name of that NFS testing tool the 
FreeBSD guys were using?  Think it came from Apple.  They used it to 
find and isolate bugs in the FreeBSD code a while ago.

Sounds like it might be useful here.

:-)

You can find a write about it here:
http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=327

The actual link to the source
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/tools/regression/fsx/


Thanks James.

That's definitely the one.

D'Arcy, if you want to test if your NFS layer is stable, this might 
really help.  It's a single C file that get compiled, and you run it 
against a remote NFS file.

This is supposed to be one of those tools that will try to trip up the 
NFS layer in every possible way, without violating the spec, etc.

Hope this is useful.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

James



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Re: [HACKERS] PostgreSQL, NetBSD and NFS

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:
snip

Hoo boy.  I was already suspecting data corruption in the index, and
this looks like more of the same.  My thoughts are definitely straying
in the direction of the NFS server is dropping bits, somehow.

Both this and the (admittedly unproven) bt_moveright loop suggest
corrupted values in the cross-page links that exist at the very end of
each btree index page.  I wonder if it is possible that, every so often,
you are losing just the last few bytes of an NFS transfer?


Hmmm... does anyone remember the name of that NFS testing tool the 
FreeBSD guys were using?  Think it came from Apple.  They used it to 
find and isolate bugs in the FreeBSD code a while ago.

Sounds like it might be useful here.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


			regards, tom lane



--
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Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System - My final thoughts

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:


 + Aside from all this, it might be nice to have a few Win32 specific 
gui pieces in place at the time that PostgreSQL 7.4 Win32 is released. 
Am sure they'll develop over time, but was thinking we should at least 
make a good impression with the first release.  Hey, if we make a really 
bad impression with the first release, then there might not be the 
quadruple-zillion Windows PG users after all.  If that sounds like a 
good idea, maybe adding the GUC variables random_query_delay 
(minutes), crash_how_often (seconds), and reboot_plus_corrupt_please 
(true/false)?


What we need is for the backend to query postgresql.org to set those
parameters, so we can control how many Win32 users adopt PostgreSQL.  :-)


All your [data] base belong to us ?

;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Last call for 7.3.2

[Justin Clift]

Tom Lane wrote:

The plan for 7.3.2 release is for Marc to wrap the tarball tomorrow and
announce on Tuesday.  I have already stamped the version number and
updated the release history in CVS, but is there anyone out there with
last-minute fixes?

In particular, is there anything that needs to be done to update the
pre-built documentation that will go into the tarball?  I'm still quite
unclear on what our build process for that is ...


Alex Avriette (CC'd) mentioned yesterday that he's generated patches to 
make sure 7.3.x works on IRIX, as presently it won't compile with gcc.

Have prodded him to submit them _now_ for review if possible.

If not, then heck, we tried.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

			regards, tom lane


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

Curt Sampson wrote:
snip
 What I'm hearing here is that all we really need to do to compete with
 MySQL on Windows is to make the UI a bit slicker. So what's the problem
 with someone building, for each release, a set of appropriate 
binaries, and
 someone making a slick install program that will install postgres,
 install parts of cygwin if necessary, and set up postgres as a service?

The non-code related parts of the Win32 port of PostgreSQL that are 
being looked at:

 + Working on the packaging bits (slick install program) already.  Have 
created a project - pgsqlwin - on GBorg to hold any specific bits we need.

   http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgsqlwin/projdisplay.php

  First release of the *extremely alpha* Proof of Concept version is at:

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pgsql/PgSQL731wina1.exe?download


 + Concerned about including GPL stuff without having 100% totally 
investigated the ramifications for people including the Win32 version of 
PostgreSQL as a built-in part of their applications.  Not going to 
commit anything even slightly GPL related to that GBorg project until it 
100% safe to do so without affect our ability to release it as BSD. 
Have some preliminary information regarding this, but just need to wrap 
my head around it properly.  Not going to look at it closely for another 
week or so.

 + It would be greatly helpful to have some way for the install program 
to automatically add the Log in as a service Win32 priviledge to the 
postgres user without having to instruct the user to do so.  We can 
create the user automatically through a shell command, but no idea how 
to add that permission.  If someone could do some Win32 API stuff to do 
it behind the scenes without a shell command even, that would be great.

 + The WinMaster project is a first go at creating a Win32 GUI command 
console for controlling the PostgreSQL service.  It's still a bit too 
basic for real use though:

   http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/winmaster/projdisplay.php

Further suggestions, volunteers, etc are totally welcome.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


 cjs


--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

Jeff Davis wrote:

What about it?  Someone claimed in this thread that MySQL's Windows port
requires Cygwin.  Is that true or not?


It's been a while, but I know I've installed MySQL on windows without any 
separate step of installing Cygwin (I can't say 100% for sure that it didn't 
install some part of Cygwin transparently to me).

From the MySQL site's page about MySQL vs PostgreSQL:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/MySQL-PostgreSQL_features.html

MySQL Server works better on Windows than PostgreSQL does. MySQL Server 
runs as a native Windows application (a service on NT/2000/XP), while 
PostgreSQL is run under the Cygwin emulation.

That seems pretty straightforward.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Regards,
	Jeff Davis


--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Browne wrote:
snip

From the MySQL site's page about MySQL vs PostgreSQL:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/MySQL-PostgreSQL_features.html

MySQL Server works better on Windows than PostgreSQL does. MySQL Server 
runs as a native Windows application (a service on NT/2000/XP), while 
PostgreSQL is run under the Cygwin emulation.

That seems pretty straightforward.

But it's not /nearly/ that straightforward.

If you look at the downloads that MySQL AB provides, they point you to a link 
that says Windows binaries use the Cygwin library.

Which apparently means that this feature is not actually a feature.  Unlike 
PostgreSQL, which is run under the Cygwin emulation, MySQL runs as a native 
Windows application (with Cygwin emulation).  Apparently those are not at all 
the same thing, even though they are both using Cygwin...

Hmm... wonder if they're meaning that MySQL compiles and executes as a 
True native windows application (skipping any unix compatibility calls), 
and it's just some of the support utils that use cygwin, or if they're 
trying to say that PostgreSQL has to operate entirely in the cygwin 
environment, whereas they don't?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] Odd website behavior...

[Justin Clift]

Dave Page wrote:
snip

Justin? We can write a techdocs styled search/results page quite easily
if you like that will use the same database, and filter to techdocs only
if that's preferred. It would be nice to get rid of Google.


Agreed.  It would be better to have Dave improved search engine do it.

Are you guys fine with ripping out the Google one and putting the new 
one in?  There is no chance I'm going to have time to do much in the way 
of assisting at the moment.

:(

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Regards, Dave.


--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System - My final thoughts

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:
snip


So, as far as I am concerned, we will have a Win32 port in 7.4.  It will
not be perfect, but it will be as good as we can do.  We are also
getting point-in-time recovery in 7.4, so that may help us with Win32
port failures too.


If anyone's interested, the PostgreSQL 7.3.1 Proof of Concept for 
Windows Alpha 1 (yes the warnings are even built into the name) 
easy-installer that I whipped up using Inno Setup was quietly uploaded 
to the pgsql project on Sourceforge the other night.  It's using 
PostgreSQL + cygwin, pretty much stock standard but pre-installed and 
wrapped up into a single installable.

As an indicater, having made no release annoucement, and only having put 
a one paragraph small mention with a link to it on the Techdocs 
Installing On Windows page (with warnings), over 1,600 people 
downloaded it in the first 24 hours (that's about 17.1 GB of bandwidth).

This was just a version so that I could practise some windows packaging 
and see what kind of things we'd need to address.  Dave has already 
pointed out that we're probably going to need to do this so it can be 
made into a Merge Module and other things.

A couple of bits of interest turned up whilst packaging:

 + There are unix command line tools that PostgreSQL relies on.  For 
example, when running initdb, it errors out if some tools aren't 
present.  i.e. sed, grep, ash (cygwin's /bin/sh), and from memory a 
few others


 + GPL licensing issues.  Am trying to get my head around the 
implications - with regards to licensing - if we released a proper 
version with some of the cygwin tools included... i.e. grep, sed, etc. 
Don't think that places could use it embedded with their products and 
not at least have source available, but still haven't totally grokked 
this all completely yet.  Not going to commit any code to the GBorg 
project that was setup the other day until this is sorted out. 
PostgreSQL 7.4 on Win32 should be properly BSD too.


 + Aside from all this, it might be nice to have a few Win32 specific 
gui pieces in place at the time that PostgreSQL 7.4 Win32 is released. 
Am sure they'll develop over time, but was thinking we should at least 
make a good impression with the first release.  Hey, if we make a really 
bad impression with the first release, then there might not be the 
quadruple-zillion Windows PG users after all.  If that sounds like a 
good idea, maybe adding the GUC variables random_query_delay 
(minutes), crash_how_often (seconds), and reboot_plus_corrupt_please 
(true/false)?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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[HACKERS] A call for PostreSQL Case Study participants

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

This is a call for PostgreSQL Case Study participants.

We're looking for volunteers running PostgreSQL in their companies, or 
who have good contact with companies running PostgreSQL, to please 
assist us in creating a large number of good quality, reference 
PostgreSQL Case Studies.

Carol Ioanni [EMAIL PROTECTED] will be assisting the 
PostgreSQL Global Development Group for the next few weeks by working 
with businesses who volunteer to be a part of this PostgreSQL initiative.

We really need everyone to get the go-ahead from the appropriate people 
in their companies or clients, and then email Carol so she can begin the 
PostgreSQL Case Study creation process with them.  It's fairly simple, 
just a matter of filling out a detailed worksheet with information about 
why PostgreSQL was chosen, and a few simple details about the 
implementation, plus signing a waiver to legally let us use the information.

These PostgreSQL Case Studies will be profiled on the PostgreSQL 
Advocacy and Marketing website, with links where appropriate to the 
participating organisations, or their referenced product pages:

http://advocacy.postgresql.org/casestudies

We feel we need enough PostgreSQL Case Studies to categorise them by 
industry segment (i.e. finance, agricultural, telecommunications) and 
also by the size of the enterprises themselves (i.e. small business, 
medium enterprise, etc).

Hoping you can help us out.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

Curtis Faith wrote:
snip
 If people are deciding what open-source database server they want to

use, Linux or FreeBSD is the obvious choice for the server OS. The kind
of people who are inclined to use PostgreSQL or MySQL will mostly NOT be
considering Windows servers.


For another perspective, we've been getting a few requests per day 
through the PostgreSQL Advocacy and Marketing site's request form along 
the lines of:

Is there a license fee for using PostgreSQL?  We'd like to distribute 
it with our XYZ product that needs a database.

Probably about 4 or so per day like this at present.  A lot of the 
people sending these emails appear to have windows based products that 
need a database, and have heard of PostgreSQL being a database that they 
don't need to pay license fee's for.  They've kind of missed the point 
of Open Source from the purist point of view, but it's still working for 
them.  ;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] [pgsql-advocacy] Linux.conf.au 2003 Report

[Justin Clift]

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
snip

We found out all sorts of interesting places that PostgreSQL is being used:
a large Australian Telco, several restaurants in the Perth area, the Debian
inventory system and the Katie revision control system.  It is also being
evaluated for process control analysis at a steel plant.  Maybe we should
chase some people for case studies?


Definitely.  Forgot to mention this before, but my gf (Carol Ioanni 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) is taking the next couple of weeks to 
assist us pretty much full time as thankfully she has some spare time 
on her hands for a bit.  :)

She's been pointed towards our urgent need for Case Studies and has 
already begun working with a couple of places to assist them in getting 
them done.  We have a standard waiver that places need to sign so 
we're legally in the clear, and a *very* professionally created Case 
Study Worksheet (donated by Sales.Org for the use of all Free / Open 
Source Software projects) that places work through and which gives us a 
very presentable result.

Carol should be a real expert at making Case Studies pretty soon now is 
my guess, as that's all she's going to be doing.  ;-)

If people could ask the places they have contact with, and whom are 
using PostgreSQL in significant ways, if they'd be happy to be a 
reference PostgreSQL Case Study, that would be great.  Some places might 
ask what's in it for them (it's been happening now and again), and 
pretty much we can tangibly say they'll be included in the PostgreSQL 
Advocacy and Marketing site's Case Studies section, and we'll be 
making downloadable PDF's of the Case Studies as well so that people can 
distribute them as needed (i.e. to their CIOs/CEOs/CTOs/etc).

For all places that are happy to get involved in this way, please email 
Carol directly and bring her into the conversation so that we can get 
them using the same Case Study Worksheet, get the waiver signed, and 
start grouping and placing the Case Studies appropriately in the Case 
Studies section.

For further background info, the present page views per day of the 
Advocacy and Marketing site from when the new PostgreSQL portal page 
went live (broken into week long groupings) are:

 5/Jan/03: 2203: +++
 6/Jan/03: 3983: +++
 7/Jan/03: 4493: ++
 8/Jan/03: 4889: +
 9/Jan/03: 4364: ++
10/Jan/03: 3513: 
11/Jan/03: 2112: +++

12/Jan/03: 2735: +++
13/Jan/03: 4405: ++
14/Jan/03: 4226: +
15/Jan/03: 3752: ++
16/Jan/03: 3467: 
17/Jan/03: 3808: ++
18/Jan/03: 1932: +

19/Jan/03: 1777: 
20/Jan/03: 3641: +
21/Jan/03: 4025: +++
22/Jan/03: 3643: +
23/Jan/03: 3310: +++
24/Jan/03: 4242: +
25/Jan/03: 2749: +++

26/Jan/03: 2834: +++
27/Jan/03: 4010: +++
28/Jan/03: 4081: 

Not huge, but not bad for the first version of the site either.  Since 
the Advocacy and Marketing site isn't very large, it means the case 
studies added there generally do get looked at.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Chris Kings-Lynne


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

Katie Ward wrote:

The latest build is still: ftp://209.61.187.152/postgres/postgres_beta4.zip

This is not exactly what Jan submitted, and the catalog number is slightly
different, but it should do for testing.


In case anyone's interested, there are step by step installation 
instructions for it at:

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/InstallingOnWindows

;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Katie



--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [mail] Re: [HACKERS] Windows Build System

[Justin Clift]

James Hubbard wrote:
snip

I open my mouth and insert foot:  Where do I get any of these scientific 
tests to determine if the latest and greatest 7.3.x will not fall down 
on my favorite Unix?

For Open Source benchmarks, there is:

Open Source Database Benchmark:
http://osdb.sf.net

With this, you *want* to use the latest CVS version, as that can 
generate it's own datasets of any size.  The older, released versions 
couldn't and you had to download databases of limited size.


Database Opensource Test Suite:
http://ltp.sourceforge.net/dotshowto.php

This works with DB2, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and looks to 
have been developed by IBM.  Haven't yet used this, but did notice that 
the configuration instructions make no reference to upping the memory 
buffers.  i.e. all of the tests they've done were probably with the 
defaults (yuck!)

Emailed this group yesterday asking if they're open to suggestions for 
improvement, and they said they definitely are.  If anyone has specific 
they'd like to let them know, they do seem open to it.


A commercial solution that people often mention is Benchmark Factory:

http://www.benchmarkfactory.com

Haven't personally used it, although it's apparently the software that 
Great Bridge used for all of their testing.


Hope this helps.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


James Hubbard



--
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who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
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[HACKERS] Has everyone else here seen the new Database Open Test Suite byIBM?

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Just came across a reference to a new Open Source database test suite by 
IBM that supports DB2, Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and MySQL:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3382release_id=115190

It's part of the Linux Test Project and only supports Linux, but it 
looks useful.

From it's Overview page:

Database Opensource Test Suite (DOTS) is a set of test
cases designed for the purpose of stress testing and long
run testing on database systems to measure database
performance and reliability.  It has two kinds of test cases
- Basic Cases and Advanced Cases.  The primary goal of Basic
Cases is stress and long run database testing; the secondary
goal is 100% JDBC API coverage.  There are 8 test cases
written in Java to cover JDBC API under the Basic Cases
category.  The goal of the Advanced Cases is modeling
real-world business logic, stress and long run testing on
database systems.  There are 2 test cases written in Java
under the Advanced Cases category.

Looking at the configuration info for PostgreSQL, it has no changes from 
the default memory configuration settings, but that's probably because 
they don't know enough about PostgreSQL to be aware of the need for that.

Thought it worth pointing out if case people here haven't yet come 
across it.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] [CYGWIN] Have a PG 7.3.1 Windows (cygwin) easy installer... now

[Justin Clift]

Dave Page wrote:
snip

No real stress there, as I'm really sure the pgAdmin team and 
yourself 
will be able to give pointers on how to make that work properly.  :)


Step 1 is use an MSI compliant setup package.


Ok, do you have any recommendations?  Using M$ Visual anything isn't 
an option, but am willing to look at alternatives.

 Step 2 is then extremely
easy. There are a number of advantages to this including:

1) DLL conflicts are handled properly by the installer service.
2) Installations can be properly rolled back in case they fail.
3) Installation patches can be created.
4) The base package can be built as a merge module which can then be
included in any other setup program for seamless integration, and a
guaranteed correct installation.


These sound like worthwhile things to cater for.



Point 4 here is very important. If people want to include PostgreSQL in
their application (which is surely what we want?), all they need do is
include the merge module in their own setup. This is how pgAdmin
installs psqlODBC. The stup builder doesn't need to know how PostgreSQL
installs and therefore doesn't have to re-write his own version of the
installer, and risk getting it wrong. It also means that the installer
service can correctly handle the installation of a PostgreSQL-included
package onto a system that already has PostgreSQL installed.


Am curious as to whether packaging solutions other than MSI use merge 
modules.  Any idea?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Regards, Dave.



--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] urgent: db corruption - invalid TIDs?

[Justin Clift]

Ned Lilly wrote:

Has anyone seen this behavior?  It's corrupted a production database.


Hi Ned,

Just as information filler, which version of PostgreSQL, and which 
operating system?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

ERROR:  heap_mark4update: (am)invalid tid
WARNING:  Error occurred while executing PL/pgSQL function issuewomaterial
WARNING:  line 40 at SQL statement



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My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
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Re: [HACKERS] Win32 port patches submitted

[Justin Clift]

Peter Eisentraut wrote:

Justin Clift writes:


The advantages to having the Win32 port be natively compatible with
Visual Studio is that it already is (no toolset-porting work needed
there),


You're missing a couple of points here.  First, the MS Visual whatever
compiler can also be used with a makefile-driven build system.  Second,
the port as it stands isn't really compatible with anything except Jan's
build instructions.  There's a lot of work to be done before we get
anything that builds out of the box in the 7.4 branch, and it's going to
be a lot easier if we do it using the build system we already have and
know.


Thanks Peter.  Really didn't know that MS Visual things could work 
with makefile driven build systems, nor that the PeerDirect build 
process was so... unique.  :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] Win32 port patches submitted

[Justin Clift]

Hannu Krosing wrote:

Bruce Momjian kirjutas P, 26.01.2003 kell 05:07:


Tom Lane wrote:


Peter Eisentraut [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:


I don't see a strong reason not
to stick with good old configure; make; make install.  You're already
requiring various Unix-like tools, so you might as well require the full
shell environment.


Indeed.  I think the goal here is to have a port that *runs* in native
Windows; but I see no reason not to require Cygwin for *building* it.


Agreed.  I don't mind Cygwin if we don't have licensing problems with
distributing a Win32 binary that used Cygwin to build.  I do have a
problem with MKS toolkit, which is a commerical purchase.  I would like
to avoid reliance on that, though Jan said he needed their bash.



IIRC mingw tools had win-native (cygwin-less) bash at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/


Have been watching this ongoing conversation and am in two frames of 
mind about:

 + There are a lot of people on Win32 that are using MS Visual C or 
Visual Studio

 + There are a few fairly well established Win32 programming IDE's that 
are compatible with cygwin/mingw32

The advantages to having the Win32 port be natively compatible with 
Visual Studio is that it already is (no toolset-porting work needed 
there), but the disadvantage is that not just any Win32 
user-with-an-interest can download it any try it out.  So... that kind 
of excludes it somewhat (Universities/colleges might have a problem too).

The advantages of having the Win32 port be natively compatible with 
gcc/cygwin/something is that once it's converted to that toolchain, it 
might be a lot less maintenance on us, as that's the toolset we use for 
the Unix builds.

As a thought, the open source Dev-C++ IDE (Win32 and Linux) works with 
gcc/cygwin/mingw32 and is pretty popular.  Just checked it's homepage on 
SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/) and it's download 
figures are pretty large.  Since March 2002 (less than 1 year ago), it's 
been downloaded about 120,000,000 times.  Wow.  120 Million downloads in 
 less than 1 year.  That's a pretty popular IDE (16th most popular 
project on SourceForge)

Anyway, as a thought, my vote would be to make the Win32 port work in 
with our toolchain or very similar (cygwin/mingw32/etc) if possible, so 
we don't have to rely on people having Visual C.  In developing 
countries too, it's going to be much easier for people to get a hold of 
things like Dev-C++ into the future as well.

Hope this provides a useful set of thoughts.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] [CYGWIN] Have a PG 7.3.1 Windows (cygwin) easy installer... now

[Justin Clift]

Dave Page wrote:
snip

Hi Justin,

Does it use the Microsoft Installer service so we can provide a merge
module for embedded installations in other products as we do for
psqlODBC? If not, I for one will probably end up redoing it all anyway
:-(


Hi Dave,

It's an installation setup.exe type of thing, created using a product 
called Inno Setup.

Spent about 20 minutes last night on an email to Mark (mlw) yesterday 
after analysing his Inno Setup script (he's got some good ideas in 
there), but Mozilla died when I hit send.  Arrgh.

It would be cool if we had a project on GBorg for it, so we can create 
and co-ordinate the windows specific bits that will be desirable to 
have for 7.4 when it's released.  We can use 7.3.1 for the moment and 
practise with that.  There's probably no real reason that people can't 
use the 7.3.1 version for smaller stuff in the real world (personal 
workstation database for development, etc).

The package here also has the ODBC drivers in it, but doesn't include 
pgAdmin, nor Igor's WinMaster.  It was originally assembled with both of 
them, but WinMaster didn't seem to really add anything (the package 
auto-installs as a service), and with pgAdmin I was having trouble 
getting it to register HighlightBox.ocx and use it once installed.  :( 
No real stress there, as I'm really sure the pgAdmin team and yourself 
will be able to give pointers on how to make that work properly.  :)

Mark's version uses his custom built CygConsole program, based on Igor's 
WinMaster, and sounds like it has more functionality, but it doesn't 
install as a service.  The target for the package here is that 
PostgreSQL gets installed and runs in the background unless it's 
explicitely disabled or de-installed.  The package here also has a bunch 
of shortcuts in it to the websites.

Will chuck it up on the techdocs site somewhere in a few minutes as a 
temporary home until we get the GBorg project up and running.

Anyone have a good idea for the name of the project?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Regards, Dave.



--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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[HACKERS] Have a PG 7.3.1 Windows (cygwin) easy installer... now what to dowith it?

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Mark (mlw) put together a PostgreSQL installer for Windows (cygwin 
version) a little while ago, but he hasn't been responding to requests 
for feedback regarding it (probably busy).

As we're going to be releasing a native Windows version of PostgreSQL 
7.4 in a few months, it seems appropriate that we practise first to get 
the hang of making packages on Windows, plus encourage anyone with 
graphical talent to make attractive icon's for menu options, etc.

Anyway, spent the last two days making a brand new PostgreSQL 7.3.1 
Proof of Concept for Windows Alpha 1 easy-installer (11,161KB) using a 
product called Inno Setup (very nice) and have a pretty good result.

It looks and feels *really* professional, and if people didn't know that 
it was using cygwin, they'd probably never guess.

Am reckoning that the best thing to do for this is to create a project 
on GBorg of some name, upload it, and everyone who is interested can 
take it from there.

Does that sound like the best approach, and does anyone have good 
suggestions for a project name?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] [CYGWIN] Have a PG 7.3.1 Windows (cygwin) easy installer... now

[Justin Clift]

mlw wrote:

Sorry, I think there was a misunderstanding. What were you looking for?


Sorry Mark, I just thought you were busy.

Was wondering if you were going to make a project of it somewhere, so we 
can get things together and have a really decent release for Windows 
when 7.4 comes out.  :)

I used inno setup as well. If you want I can send my install script.


That would be really cool.  :)

How did you handle the user and Log on as a service aspects of it?

:)


I thought I was being very forth coming.


Yep, you 100% have a really good attitude, that's why I thought you were 
busy.

:)

I even help out on the Windows PG console window.


Took a look at it, and the three buttons seem permanently greyed out in 
the download from the WinMaster project.  Wasn't sure if it was a 
configuration issue on my part, or if the code hadn't been fleshed out yet.

Interested in making a project on GBorg or something for the complete 
Windows installer as a place to work out of?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] Release Scheduales: 7.2.4 7.3.2

[Justin Clift]

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Robert Treat wrote:



On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 14:23, Marc G. Fournier wrote:


If anyone has any 'last minute' issues they would like to see in either,
please speak now or forever hold your peace :)



Can someone post a changelog for these releases? Also what tags will
be created/used in CVS?



REL7_2_4
REL7_3_2

I'll make sure I don't forget to tag them this time :)


Have we determined that Tom's patch (the one that Josh wrote up) is 
indeed necessary?

;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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[HACKERS] C++ coding assistance request for a visualisation tool

[Justin Clift]

Hi guys,

Is there anyone here that's good with C++ and has a little bit of time
to add PostgreSQL support to a project?

There is a 4D visualisation program called Flounder:

http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/~vigmond/flounder/

And it does some pretty nifty stuff.  It takes in data sets (x, y, z,
time) and displays then graphically, saving them to image files if
needed, and also creating the time sequences as animations if needed.

Was looking at it from a performance tuning tool point of view.  i.e.
Testing PostgreSQL performance with a bunch of settings, then stuffing
the results into a database, and then using something like Flounder for
visualising it.

It seems pretty simple, and Flounder seems like it might be the right
kind of tool for doing things like this.  Was emailing with Edward
Vigmond, the author of it, and he seems to think it'd be pretty easy to
implement too.

Now, I'm not a C++ coder, and as short of time as anyone, so I was
wondering if there is anyone here who'd be interested in helping out here.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi



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Re: [HACKERS] C++ coding assistance request for a visualisation tool

[Justin Clift]

Greg Copeland wrote:

Have you tried IBM's OSS visualization package yet?  Sorry, I don't seem
to recall the name of the tool off the top of my head (Data Explorer??)
but it uses OpenGL (IIRC) and is said to be able to visualize just about
anything.  Anything is said to include simple data over time to complex
medical CT scans.


Cool.

Just found it...  IBM Open Visualization Data Explorer:

http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/

Going to check it out now.  The screenshot looks *very* nice.

;-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift



Greg


On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 12:19, Justin Clift wrote:


Hi guys,

Is there anyone here that's good with C++ and has a little bit of time
to add PostgreSQL support to a project?

There is a 4D visualisation program called Flounder:

http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/~vigmond/flounder/

And it does some pretty nifty stuff.  It takes in data sets (x, y, z,
time) and displays then graphically, saving them to image files if
needed, and also creating the time sequences as animations if needed.

Was looking at it from a performance tuning tool point of view.  i.e.
Testing PostgreSQL performance with a bunch of settings, then stuffing
the results into a database, and then using something like Flounder for
visualising it.

It seems pretty simple, and Flounder seems like it might be the right
kind of tool for doing things like this.  Was emailing with Edward
Vigmond, the author of it, and he seems to think it'd be pretty easy to
implement too.

Now, I'm not a C++ coder, and as short of time as anyone, so I was
wondering if there is anyone here who'd be interested in helping out here.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift



--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] C++ coding assistance request for a visualisation tool

[Justin Clift]

Justin Clift wrote:

Greg Copeland wrote:


Have you tried IBM's OSS visualization package yet?  Sorry, I don't seem
to recall the name of the tool off the top of my head (Data Explorer??)
but it uses OpenGL (IIRC) and is said to be able to visualize just about
anything.  Anything is said to include simple data over time to complex
medical CT scans.



Cool.

Just found it...  IBM Open Visualization Data Explorer:

http://www.research.ibm.com/dx/


That seems to be a very outdated page for it.  The new pages for it (in 
case anyone else is interested) are at:

http://www.opendx.org

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] Can we revisit the thought of PostgreSQL 7.2.4?

[Justin Clift]

mlw wrote:

This is an interesting thought. My gut tells me it is a viable 
opportunity for the corporate entities that offer support and wish to 
have 'VAR' status.

This is just my opinion, but I view the core development group as pure 
development, and the various people that resell or distribute PostgreSQL 
as a for-profit business as those responsible for maintaining backward 
support.

Maybe RedHat or PostgreSQL Inc can do this? It is a really good message, 
The best of open source, with on going support.

Very interesting thought.  It could probably be done.  Oh, hang on... 
Red Hat is taking that angle for now.  :-)


And not to re-open a can of worms, but if PostgreSQL could upgrade 
without having to do a dump and restore, then this wouldn't really be an 
issue.

That's not really true.  Have personally seen applications that places 
use and rely on that are not yet compatible with v 7.3.x, because the 
vendors of the applications compiled against something that was of 
version 7.2.x, and doesn't work with version 7.3.x.

Now, that's not our fault, and not the fault of the places running the 
applications, it's just part of how PostgreSQL is applied out in the 
real world.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
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Re: [HACKERS] Anyone want to get involved in writing the the driver

[Justin Clift]

Jeroen T. Vermeulen wrote:

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 01:20:45PM +1030, Justin Clift wrote:


Have been discussing what it would take to write an SDBC driver for 
connecting StarOffice/OpenOffice to PostgreSQL with Frank Schönheit, a 
senior member of the Sun StarOffice/OpenOffice DBA team, and a few 
senior members of the OpenOffice project.

I think something like this is already being done based on libpqxx.
See http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/libpqxx/bugs/bugupdate.php?403
for a feature request related to this work.


Thanks Jeroen, it's good news.

That's a bug filed by Peter Novodvorsky, but haven't seen him using that 
email address before.  He's a pretty decent guy that started writing a 
PostgreSQL SDBC driver for OpenOffice many months ago, but seemed to 
have stopped and dropped out of sight.

Looks like he might still be working on it.

Will ask him, see how far he's gotten, how much more is needed, and so 
forth.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift


Jeroen




--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
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first group; there was less competition there.
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[HACKERS] Survey results from the PostgreSQL portal page

[Justin Clift]

Hi everyone,

Dave Page put up a new survey on the PostgreSQL portal page very 
recently,  What would attract the most new PostgreSQL users? and the 
results in already are interesting (1,529 results as this is being written):

http://www.postgresql.org/survey.php?SurveyID=9

Listed from most voted for to least voted for we have:

***

AnswerResponses Percentage

More speed   505  33.028%
Win32 Port   390  25.507%
Replication  386  25.245%
Better docs  160  10.464%
More features 32   2.093%
Better marketing  29   1.897%
Better migration  18   1.177%
PITR   9   0.589%

Total number of responses: 1529

***

Now, we don't necessarily have a speed problem, as people who take the 
time to tune the database can attest to, so this is making me consider 
why such a large percentage of folk would vote for that.

The possibilities that come to mind immediately are:

 + People don't know that they should tune the database, and are 
leaving the configuration settings at the defaults.

   We could adjust the perception of PostgreSQL's speed for these
   people by adjusting the default settings.  We were already
   considering raising the memory buffer defaults weren't we?


 + People are having troubles related to VACUUM.

   This is being worked on presently isn't it?


 + People don't know *how* to tune the database properly yet?


 + Maybe we need more inbuilt self-tuning abilities or utilities for 
PostgreSQL?


Other interesting conclusions can be drawn from the results too, one of 
which is that only about 2% of people are asking for more features, and 
also that only about 2% are looking for better marketing.

Anyway, thought this worth bringing to people's attention, as we may 
find some value in it.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] Can we revisit the thought of PostgreSQL 7.2.4?

[Justin Clift]

Bruce Momjian wrote:

Tom Lane wrote:

snip

PS: I'm not taking a position on Justin's suggestion that there should
be a 7.2.4.  Marc and Bruce would be the ones who have to do the work,
so they get to make the decision...


Who, us?  Well, there is the confusion factor of releasing a patch to a
superceeded major version.  Wrapping it up and putting it out really
isn't a big deal.  Marc?


Hi Marc,

Would you be ok with us releasing a 7.2.4?

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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Re: [HACKERS] Survey results from the PostgreSQL portal page

[Justin Clift]

Michael Meskes wrote:

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 01:19:03PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:


pretty wide feature set (as good as any other open source rdbms afaik)
plus it's open source, so if we don't have a feature that say oracle has,
you can pay someone the $10,000+ the oracle license will cost to implement
it. I've also not seen much FUD on the other issues either. If you can



Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way. I knew one government
organization that decided to go for Oracle for 500K Euro instead of
adding the missing features (actually almost exclusively PITR). One of
the top arguments I heard was: I don't believe that free software
community works. Once the developers get a social life or even kids,
they stop working on software. Of course I told him that I still do
work on free software despite having three sons on which he answered:
Maybe, but I still don't believe it. 

Sad but true.

Interesting observation, and not entirely irrelevant.  It's the strength 
of any particular Open Source Community that seems to indicate whether 
or not there are going to be enough people getting involved to overcome 
the attrition rate of the people becoming less involved.

With PostgreSQL, a lot of work goes into building and feeding the 
community.  That includes making sure the right people are talking to 
each other, assisting people to find the information they need, and 
other simpler stuff like making sure the basic facilities work (cvs, 
ftp, websites, etc).

We are fortunate in that being based on a BSD license is assisting 
businesses to adopt PostgreSQL without needing to think too hard about 
licensing ramifications, and we are also fortunate that the quality of 
PostgreSQL is extremely good and has an increasingly excellent 
reputation that is attracting people from countries all over the world 
to get involved.

When people suggest that the Free Software Community doesn't work, it 
may be worthwhile pointing out that it works very well for the 
Communities that are strong, but he could be correct for those that 
haven't become self-sufficient yet.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Michael



--
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there.
- Indira Gandhi


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