Re: postgresql publication

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Kevin Hunter wrote:

> May I naively ask what some of these ideas are? I ask because I think
> we're coming at this publication thing from two different sides.

Some sample article ideas I've culled from watching what people ask about
on the performance list (the main area I follow) are:

-How can I tell if auto-vacuum is working effectively for me?
-Is there a way to check that my table statistics are being collected
usefully?
-How do you measure index bloat and fix it if it's bad?
-What should I be paying attention to in the pg_stat* views?
-What's the useful range for configuring background writer parameters?

There are partial answers to all these questions in the archives because
these topics come up regularly, and these are addressed to some extent in
the documentation. But the information is really spread out and it's
unreasonable to expect people will find it even if they know what to look
for--which they usually don't, they just know things are running slowly
but don't know why.

Writing stuff like this is unglamorous, usually takes much longer than
originally expected once you're deep enough in the writing research to
have mapped out the whole area, is hard to keep current as version
advances obsolete the content, and as I already mentioned writing pays
badly compared to consulting to fix these problems for individual clients
instead (and really badly compared to selling training services). That
means on top of there not being a large pool of qualified writers, some of
the people who'd be in a great position to write have a strong economic
incentive not to share their respective secret sauces.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD