Re: [HACKERS] What can we learn from MySQL?

Here is a blog about a recent MySQL conference with title, "Why MySQL
Grew So Fast":

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4715

and a a Slashdot discussion about it:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/20/2229212&mode=nested&tid=137&tid=185&tid=187&tid=198

My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.

Questions I have are:

o Are we marketing ourselves properly?
o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?
o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
say is "too much" (Oracle)
o Are our priorities too technically driven?

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.

MySQL was my first introduction to SQL databases (I had dabbled with
Clipper and Foxpro years earlier, but only for a couple of months and
had forgotten most of it by then). So practically all I knew about SQL
and RDBMS I got from the MySQL manual. IIRC, MySQL has a chapter for
beginners, on how to create your first database and tables, how to
insert a record, etc.

I see that the Pg manual already has that. Good.

The problem is that, since MySQL was my only SQL database I knew for a
long time, I didn't know that an RDBMS can be [much] more than what
MySQL was/is. I could only do simple SELECTs (no JOINs, let alone
subselect since MySQL doesn't support it) but found it sufficient, since
I did most of the hard work from Perl/PHP (for example, doing an
adjacency tree query by several SELECTs and combining the results myself
from the client side).

I didn't know squat about stored procedures or triggers or check
constraints. I had no idea what a foreign key is -- and when MySQL
manual says it's not necessary, slow, and evil, I believed it.

I never bothered checking out other databases until I started reading
more about transactions, reliability, Date/Codd, and other more
theoretical stuffs. Only then I started trying out Interbase, Firebird,
SAPDB, DB2, Oracle, and later Pg.

So in my opinion, as long as the general awareness about RDBMS (on what
tasks/responsibilities it should do, what features it generally has to
have, etc) is low, people will be looking at MySQL as "good enough" and
will not be motivated to look around for something better. As a
comparison, I'm always amazed by people who use Windows 95/98/Me. They
find it normal/"good enough" that the system crashes every now and then,
has to be rebooted every few hours (or every time they install
something). They don't know of anything better.

So perhaps the direction of advocacy should be towards increasing that
awareness?

--
dave

> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> Questions I have are:

I have already told Bruce at length about the single most common
complaint in the phpPgAdmin lists and in the IRC channel: the inability
to change column types. I think we should listen to the punters on that
one.

Also, how about a new section in the manual: PostgreSQL for MySQL users
and PostgreSQL for Oracle users?

Chris

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Here is a blog about a recent MySQL conference with title, "Why MySQL
>Grew So Fast":
>
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4715
>
>and a a Slashdot discussion about it:
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/20/2229212&mode=nested&tid=137&tid=185&tid=187&tid=198
>
>My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
>anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
>Questions I have are:
>
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?
> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?
> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)
> o Are our priorities too technically driven?
>
>
>
Do we care enough about interoperability?

When I ask about non-standard complience of Pg (turning unquoted
identifiers to lowercase instead of uppercase, violating the SQL
standard, and requring an expensive rewrite of clients), and I get the
answer "uppercase is ugly", I think something is wrong.

To be fair, I got a fair amount of legitimate problems with MIGRATING to
standard compliency. I find these issues legitimate, though solveable.
Getting a "we prefer lowercase to the standard", however, means to me
that even if I write a patch to start migration, I'm not likely to get
it in.

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 21:09, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>

One common thing people talk about is ease of use. However that puzzles
me, since it takes all of (about) three commands to install postgresql
and log into the database for the first time. I use debian, so it
amounts to "apt-get install", su to "postgres" and "psql template1".

I suspect some of the difficulties lie in how distributions of linux (a
large part of the pg user base) present postgres.

Postgres is a server system, and the only real interface it provides is
SQL, and "CREATE TABLE" and other simple commands are the same as in
MySQL. How can it be easier to use?

I think debian does a great job, do other distros make it so easy?

Here are some ideas at the distribution level:

o Ask a question during install to create a database other than
template0 and template1.
o If it's a GUI-based distro, install and lauch pgadmin3 and
provide some icons.
o If it's a GUI distro, lauch a browser to a special tutorial
at the distributors website so that users can see instantly
how to start doing things without going through the install
instructions or instructions about how to create a new
database. It should show pgadmin3 and show how to execute
queries (and provide the same simple examples you see in any
SQL tutorial), and then later show how to use psql from the
command line.
o If it's being installed from the command line, maybe have a
final question "Launch PgSQL quickstart?" that would run a
script to provide instructions interactively, like saying
"Now type createdb ... this will make a starting database",
"now type psql ...", "now type CREATE TABLE ...".
o If you look at windows packages, even servers, there's always
an interface to click on and then "browse around". This
interface detects the fact that something is installed and
allows you to administer it somehow.

Those are just ideas. MySQL doesn't do any of that, so I can't really
see how people say it's easier.

One very legitimate concern is the PostgreSQL site's search
functionality. I really like php.net, and I think MySQL tries to make
their website like PHP's. That requires manpower, and we've already
discussed that on this list.

Overall, I think that the PostgreSQL project has done everything very
well. It compiles very nicely and provides a lot of tools. Beyond that,
we just need adoption from application developers, distributions who
spend more time making PostgreSQL easy to use, and ISPs.

I don't know what you mean by "too technically driven". I guess the
release process of postgresql isn't very marketing friendly. Often what
happens with development being as open as it is here, is that people get
excited about a set of new features, and not all of them make it in to
the next release. From the outside it looks like postgres is slow and
not providing many new features. Maybe we should throw old features into
the press release just to remind people that postgres has had the
features for years :) (i.e. "7.5 has native win32 support, and yes, it
still has foreign keys and stored procedures, and yes, they even work in
win32!" might work, assuming of course that win32 is ready for release
at that time).

Regards,
Jeff Davis

> I have already told Bruce at length about the single most common
> complaint in the phpPgAdmin lists and in the IRC channel: the inability
> to change column types. I think we should listen to the punters on that
> one.
>

Maybe a simple and less dangerous option would be to add a column of the
new type, rename the old column and hide it, and select from the old
column and cast it to the new column? Is that a feasible implementation?
If I really need to change a column, that's what I'd do.

It's certainly less dangerous than MySQL. I remember a horror story
watching my column silently cast itself to a bunch of blank values in
MySQL. In postgres you'd just be able to undo it or fix the problem
since the data is still there. I also understand that MySQL has to copy
the entire table or something insane like that, so we could use the
opportunity to brag about how much more efficient we are for large
tables.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> Questions I have are:
>
> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?

There are two issues here : ease-of-use for admin and basic users.

I recognize my focus on the later as someone using pg as a teaching tool.

Having a correct SQL implementation, referential integrity and
transactions is an important issue when explaining DB concepts.
That's why I could not have used mysql.

Having some help/hint/advices/caveat provided for basic users would help.
But some of the change I submitted require a lot of changes, especially in
the parser, hence are rejected.

I also submit patch to try to fix some "surprises" (there is != but not
==, non-user tables are in stat_.._user_tables viewa...) I had while using
pg.

My agenda is quite hard to get thru the hacker/patch lists. Maybe
because the patches I sent are not really good enough, but also because
it is not a real focus of postgres developers.

On for former point, admin ease-of-use, A little story a few month ago.

I succeeded in advising production people here to switch some applications
from a mysql database, which was working perfectly, to a postgres
database. A few weeks later, the performances were desastrous. 30 seconds
to get an answer to a simple select on a 1500 entries tables. After
investigation, the problems were:

- no vacuum, although there were daily "DELETE FROM tables;"
to empty all the data and reload from another source.

- no analyze, because the admin did not know about it.

- very small "shared_buffers" setting (16 the minimum thanks to FreeBSD
default installation...).

With mysql, you don't need to vacuum analyze, and I think the memory
management maybe more or less "automatic".

I think that the default configuration should have some "automagic"
features so that reasonnable values are chosen depending on the available
resources, which would allow basic users not to care about it.

memory_management = auto/manual...

You also need to have a basic standalone binary port to windows. I wish I
could allow simply my students to use pg on their home computers. Well, it
does not work that simply, you need cygwin at the time, and I haven't seen
the windows binary available for download from the pg download page.

> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)

"free and serious".

> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

Not bad if other agendas can also get through.

--
Fabien Coelho - coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr

> I think debian does a great job, do other distros make it so easy?

On Mac OS X, there's Marc Liyanage's binary package, which is about as
simple as it gets to install. But PostgreSQL also compiles pretty
nicely out of the box.

So I think it is really more a question of being known and known in a
good light.

Also on Mac OS X Server, MySQL is included by default. Has anyone tried
to lobby Apple about including PostgreSQL too?

Cheers.

---------------
Francois

Home page: http://www.monpetitcoin.com/

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:05:21PM +0700, David Garamond wrote:
> So in my opinion, as long as the general awareness about RDBMS (on what
> tasks/responsibilities it should do, what features it generally has to
> have, etc) is low, people will be looking at MySQL as "good enough" and
> will not be motivated to look around for something better. As a
> comparison, I'm always amazed by people who use Windows 95/98/Me. They
> find it normal/"good enough" that the system crashes every now and then,
> has to be rebooted every few hours (or every time they install
> something). They don't know of anything better.

Agree. People don't know that an RDBMS can be more better.

A lot of users think speed is the most important thing. And they check
the performance of SQL server by "time mysql -e "SELECT..." but they
don't know something about concurrency or locking.

BTW, is the current MySQL target (replication, transactions, ..etc)
what typical MySQL users expect? I think they will lost users who love
classic, fast and simple MySQL. The trade with advanced SQL servers is
pretty full. I don't understand why MySQL developers want to leave
their current possition and want to fight with PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2
.. etc.

Karel

--
Karel Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> When I ask about non-standard complience of Pg (turning unquoted
> identifiers to lowercase instead of uppercase, violating the SQL
> standard, and requring an expensive rewrite of clients), and I get the
> answer "uppercase is ugly", I think something is wrong.

I would love if someone fixed pg so that one can get the standard
behaviour. It would however have to be a setting that can be changed so we
are still backward compatible.

> that even if I write a patch to start migration, I'm not likely to get
> it in.

Just changing to uppercase would break old code so such a patch should not
just be commited. But would people stop a patch that is backward
compatible (in the worst case a setting during initdb)? I'm not so sure
they will.

--
/Dennis Björklund

Karel Zak wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:05:21PM +0700, David Garamond wrote:
>
>>So in my opinion, as long as the general awareness about RDBMS (on what
>>tasks/responsibilities it should do, what features it generally has to
>>have, etc) is low, people will be looking at MySQL as "good enough" and
>>will not be motivated to look around for something better. As a
>>comparison, I'm always amazed by people who use Windows 95/98/Me. They
>>find it normal/"good enough" that the system crashes every now and then,
>>has to be rebooted every few hours (or every time they install
>>something). They don't know of anything better.
>
>
> Agree. People don't know that an RDBMS can be more better.
>
> A lot of users think speed is the most important thing. And they check
> the performance of SQL server by "time mysql -e "SELECT..." but they
> don't know something about concurrency or locking.

Even worse: They benchmark "SELECT 1+1" one million times.
The performance of "SELECT 1+1" has NOTHING to do with the REAL
performance of a database.
Has anybody seen the benchmarks on MySQL??? They have benchmarked
"CREATE TABLE" and so forth. This is the most useless thing I have ever
seen.

It is so annoying _ I had to post it ;).

Regards,

Hans

> BTW, is the current MySQL target (replication, transactions, ..etc)
> what typical MySQL users expect? I think they will lost users who love
> classic, fast and simple MySQL. The trade with advanced SQL servers is
> pretty full. I don't understand why MySQL developers want to leave
> their current possition and want to fight with PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2
> .. etc.
>
> Karel
>

--
Cybertec Geschwinde u Schoenig
Schoengrabern 134, A-2020 Hollabrunn, Austria
Tel: +43/2952/30706 or +43/664/233 90 75
www.cybertec.at, www.postgresql.at, kernel.cybertec.at

Hi!

Jeff Davis wrote:
>>My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
>>anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> One common thing people talk about is ease of use. However that puzzles
> me, since it takes all of (about) three commands to install postgresql
> and log into the database for the first time. I use debian, so it
> amounts to "apt-get install", su to "postgres" and "psql template1".

"Ease of use" == "I would like to install it on my precious-s-s win*
without this horrible Cygwin"

No more, no less.

> One very legitimate concern is the PostgreSQL site's search
> functionality. I really like php.net, and I think MySQL tries to make
> their website like PHP's. That requires manpower, and we've already
> discussed that on this list.

"discussed" is good, but where's that "manpower"?

Rather than contining with the answers that you and the others have
contributed to the thread I'm going to respond to this first posting.

The first link that you've quoted is a mixture of fact that I can agree
with and an excuse to express an ego.

I was first introduced to pc based databases back around when DBase came
out. DBase II was not that good but DBase-III+ was what set the measure
for everything else that came onto the PC, including oracle. Ironically
the blog that you've listed is a demonstration of the success of the
human desire to justify ones value system by converting others. What
drove the development of sql related technology has less to do with
technology and more to do with psychology and human nature.

In my opinion MySQL became popular because of the internet (no news
there). I still remember the days when a person could get paid $300 for
composing one html page. People get spoilt making this kind of money so
when companies like microsoft started putting out products that
simplified html composing, like frontpage, thus allowing less skilled
children onto the market, the html page composers saw the writing on the
wall and started hunting for the next 'evolution' which was of course
dynamic pages.

Netscape was king in those days and javascript made a great impression
on the community. What a concept to be able to change the way a page
looked and acted. So now the emphasis was instead of making money on a
static page it would be a dynamic one.

The more popular a technology is the higher the elite must raise the bar
to continue making gobs of money. So as more people jumped on the
bandwagon we had to look at other ways of expanding the word 'dynamic'.
Enter databased information.

Meanwhile, as html was getting more complicated we had taken our
classically trained views of programming languages and applied it to
server side includes and to javascript. But javascript is such a bitch
so cgi remained important until larry showed up and changed the paradign
by looking at the person rather than the language (remember larry's a
linguist) and we stared using perl.

So now people started using databased technology on the internet.
Remember, I speak of the grass roots and not that very small minority of
DBA's that had a real understanding of databases. MySQL became popular,
it "bragged" (this is the point folks) that you could attach your
programming language to it and get good results. And for what it's is
worth, this was true. People hate to change and need to justify their
decisions in life with the money they make so programming stayed outside
of the database for a long time giving MySQL time to evolve.

The reason why MySQL remains relevant because it grew up at rate that
the grass roots expectations grew.

PostgreSQL is different, it was never part of this movement because of
its roots. Using this view of history I would argue that Pg is the
newcomer and MySQL is the veteran.

If we want to reach the 'popular' masses then we need to consider the
psychology of the internet ... go after the grass roots by convincing
them that their jobs are on the line if they don't learn proper
relational theory. Show them! Give them examples!

There's three phases to software development:
- programming
- debugging
- documentation

You old timers have done the first two. Now it's time to address the
last one. And if you don't agree with what I say it may not perhaps be
so much because I'm wrong but because you have not invested your
self-image into that activity. Success is about figuring out what
everybody wants before they do. And the measure of success is not
technology its money.

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Here is a blog about a recent MySQL conference with title, "Why MySQL
>Grew So Fast":
>
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4715
>
>and a a Slashdot discussion about it:
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/20/2229212&mode=nested&tid=137&tid=185&tid=187&tid=198
>
>My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
>anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
>Questions I have are:
>
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?
> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?
> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)
> o Are our priorities too technically driven?
>
>
>

Dennis Bjorklund <db(at)zigo(dot)dhs(dot)org> writes:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>> When I ask about non-standard complience of Pg (turning unquoted
>> identifiers to lowercase instead of uppercase, violating the SQL
>> standard, and requring an expensive rewrite of clients), and I get the
>> answer "uppercase is ugly", I think something is wrong.

> I would love if someone fixed pg so that one can get the standard
> behaviour. It would however have to be a setting that can be changed so we
> are still backward compatible.

Yes. There have been repeated discussions about how to do this, but
no one's come up with a solution that seems workable. See the archives
if you care.

For the foreseeable future, backwards compatibility is going to trump
standards compliance on this point. That doesn't mean we don't care
about compliance; it does mean that it is not the *only* goal.

I find it a bit odd to be debating this point in this thread, seeing
that one of the big lessons I draw from MySQL is "standards compliance
does not matter"...

regards, tom lane

On Apr 23, 2004, at 8:35 AM, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

>> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
>> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>> Questions I have are:
>
> I have already told Bruce at length about the single most common
> complaint in the phpPgAdmin lists and in the IRC channel: the
> inability to change column types. I think we should listen to the
> punters on that one.
>
> Also, how about a new section in the manual: PostgreSQL for MySQL
> users and PostgreSQL for Oracle users?

Hello Bruce, Chris and everyone,
So far I have offered free PHP5/ PostgreSQL hosting to around 800
developers that signed up on dotgeek.org
I gathered a number of feedback.

Overall many PHP developers are extremely impressed by PostgreSQL but
they never had the chance/found a reason to try it.

The issues are related mainly to the syntax. Here MySQL, by using non
standards systems, is making the move not that easy to many developers.

Marketing is an important point, so is being able to let the highest
number of people to try PostgreSQL and see the difference.
Another problem is, as far as I can say, their easier to search and
more user friendly manual. I know that Alexey is working on that so I
will think about a way
to contribute directly. Users (and monitored) comments are a must IMHO.

Cheers
David Costa

>
> Chris
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives?
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org

> There are two issues here : ease-of-use for admin and basic users.
>
> On for former point, admin ease-of-use, A little story a few month ago.
>
> I succeeded in advising production people here to switch some applications
> from a mysql database, which was working perfectly, to a postgres
> database. A few weeks later, the performances were desastrous. 30 seconds
> to get an answer to a simple select on a 1500 entries tables. After
> investigation, the problems were:
>
> - no vacuum, although there were daily "DELETE FROM tables;"
> to empty all the data and reload from another source.
>
> - no analyze, because the admin did not know about it.

My goal is to have pg_autovacuum integrated into the backend for 7.5. I
don't know if it will default to being turned on or off, I'm sure that
will be a discussion, but if it is defaulted to on, then this whole
problem of having to train newbies about vacuum should just go away.

Matthew

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> > My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> > anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
> >
> > Questions I have are:
>
> I have already told Bruce at length about the single most common
> complaint in the phpPgAdmin lists and in the IRC channel: the inability
> to change column types. I think we should listen to the punters on that
> one.

Yea, I will push that for 7.5.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

>> My goal is to have pg_autovacuum integrated into the backend for 7.5.
>
> I know about that, and that would be a good thing.

I hope so!

>> I don't know if it will default to being turned on or off, I'm sure that
>> will be a discussion, but if it is defaulted to on, then this whole
>> problem of having to train newbies about vacuum should just go away.
>
> Yes. I really thing that it should be on by default, because those who
> will need it more than others are those who will not know about tuning
> configuration parameters. As I understand the requirements from
> pg_autovacuum, it means that some statistics will have to be on by default
> as well.

I think it's premature to have this conversation. I need to get something
done / working before we dicuss optimal configuration. That said, I also
agree that if it's good enough, it should be on by default.

> Good luck;-)

Thanks, I'll need it....

Matthew

ps: I'm hoping to have time to work on this starting in May. I haven't
really done any development on pg_autovacuum beyond bug fixing what is
already in CVS, so.... If someone out there wants to work on it, don't
wait for me, I won't be offended :-) I just want to see it up and
running.

Am Freitag, 23. April 2004 06:09 schrieb Bruce Momjian:
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?
> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?
> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)
> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

Success is not measured by absolute number of installations. You can measure
success by having enough users so that the project can continue, enough users
so you can make a living, more satisfied users than unsatisfied ones, more
heavy-duty installations than personal database-driven websites, and by
having a product that you feel good about. The only way to position
ourselves is as the relational database with the best price/performance
ration (price = TOC, performance = features + speed). And the only way to
achieve any of these goals is by focussing on technology and ease of use.
For the crowd out there, PostgreSQL is an exciting and growing topic. That's
more important than the installation count.

Dear Matthew,

> My goal is to have pg_autovacuum integrated into the backend for 7.5.

I know about that, and that would be a good thing.

> I don't know if it will default to being turned on or off, I'm sure that
> will be a discussion, but if it is defaulted to on, then this whole
> problem of having to train newbies about vacuum should just go away.

Yes. I really thing that it should be on by default, because those who
will need it more than others are those who will not know about tuning
configuration parameters. As I understand the requirements from
pg_autovacuum, it means that some statistics will have to be on by default
as well.

Good luck;-)

--
Fabien Coelho - coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr

> One common thing people talk about is ease of use. However that puzzles
> me, since it takes all of (about) three commands to install postgresql
> and log into the database for the first time. I use debian, so it
> amounts to "apt-get install", su to "postgres" and "psql template1".

My present theory is that most users make the decision regarding ease of
use before even installing the software.

If you look at the MySQL website within 1 or 2 clicks, you know that
there is a gui for queries, a gui for administration, drivers or
interfaces for many programming langauges. They have GIS, Unicode, full
text searching, multi-master replication, ANSI compliance, etc.

Not that all of those items are necessarily true, but that is what the
user believes.

In contrast, from the PostgresSQL website I know PostgreSQL can deal
with a large dataset, has lots of backend features, supports many
languages. Looking hard enough you might find a link to the
pgreplication which currently has the goal of integrating with
PostgreSQL 7.2 ;)

You don't learn anything about the GUIs (any of them) within the first
couple of clicks. Since many users (even linux users) associate command
lines with difficulty of use, the first impression is that PostgreSQL is
difficult to use.

> > One very legitimate concern is the PostgreSQL site's search
> > functionality. I really like php.net, and I think MySQL tries to make
> > their website like PHP's. That requires manpower, and we've already
> > discussed that on this list.
>
> "discussed" is good, but where's that "manpower"?

If we have a good idea of what it is we want, I'll volunteer to write
it.

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
>anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
>
>
MySQL became popular at my university when the students discovered they
could install it on their personal computers. Just the exposure for
personal development and trial is enough to win a following.

Win32 installations are a big deal. With win32 machines outnumbering
*nix operating systems by more than 10 to 1 (more on personal
computers), the "unix only" restriction reduced the number of possible
people testing and developing with it by at least that amount. Most
developers I know work primarily on Windows workstations and asking for
a machine to run Postgresql on unix is just not practical. With the
win32 port, they can run it on their computers and at least test or
evaluate their projects.

I and a number of my friends are exceptionally please at the progress of
the win32 port. Thank you!

Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
vacuumming at certain times of the day.

Dave
On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 08:58, Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> > There are two issues here : ease-of-use for admin and basic users.
> >
> > On for former point, admin ease-of-use, A little story a few month ago.
> >
> > I succeeded in advising production people here to switch some applications
> > from a mysql database, which was working perfectly, to a postgres
> > database. A few weeks later, the performances were desastrous. 30 seconds
> > to get an answer to a simple select on a 1500 entries tables. After
> > investigation, the problems were:
> >
> > - no vacuum, although there were daily "DELETE FROM tables;"
> > to empty all the data and reload from another source.
> >
> > - no analyze, because the admin did not know about it.
>
> My goal is to have pg_autovacuum integrated into the backend for 7.5. I
> don't know if it will default to being turned on or off, I'm sure that
> will be a discussion, but if it is defaulted to on, then this whole
> problem of having to train newbies about vacuum should just go away.
>
> Matthew
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ?
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html
>
>
>
> !DSPAM:40892fd393131228097780!
>
>
--
Dave Cramer
519 939 0336
ICQ # 14675561

Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> I think it's premature to have this conversation. I need to get something
> done / working before we dicuss optimal configuration. That said, I also
> agree that if it's good enough, it should be on by default.
>
> > Good luck;-)
>
> Thanks, I'll need it....
>
> Matthew
>
> ps: I'm hoping to have time to work on this starting in May. I haven't
> really done any development on pg_autovacuum beyond bug fixing what is
> already in CVS, so.... If someone out there wants to work on it, don't
> wait for me, I won't be offended :-) I just want to see it up and
> running.

I am around for assistance.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 05:22, Dennis Bjorklund wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> > When I ask about non-standard complience of Pg (turning unquoted
> > identifiers to lowercase instead of uppercase, violating the SQL
> > standard, and requring an expensive rewrite of clients), and I get the
> > answer "uppercase is ugly", I think something is wrong.
>
> I would love if someone fixed pg so that one can get the standard
> behaviour. It would however have to be a setting that can be changed so we
> are still backward compatible.
>
> > that even if I write a patch to start migration, I'm not likely to get
> > it in.
>
> Just changing to uppercase would break old code so such a patch should not
> just be commited. But would people stop a patch that is backward
> compatible (in the worst case a setting during initdb)? I'm not so sure
> they will.
>

I know this to be true, but don't fully understand it... if our default
behavior is to fold lower, and we change it to just fold upper... then
in theory this shouldn't break anything since what used to be folder
lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
breaks inside the db.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

> Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
> windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
> vacuumming at certain times of the day.

No the current implementation doesn't, but such a feature is in the works
(planned anyway). What I was envisioning is the ability to set two
different sets of thresholds (peak / off peak). If you demand zero
vacuuming during peak times, you could set that threshold to -1, or some
such setting.

FYI I wouldn't remcommend defaulting pg_autovacuum to on until it does
this, and a few more things that are also planned (see the archives).

Matthew

> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:07:20 -0400
> Dave Cramer <pg(at)fastcrypt(dot)com> wrote:
>> Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
>> windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
>> vacuumming at certain times of the day.
>
> It seems to me that the point of pg_autovacuum would be to run 24/7 so
> that there is never big hit on the system. Perhaps it could be designed
> to throttle itself based on current system usage though.

Right, there has been some talk about taking the system load into account,
but no action yet.

One comment I failed to make in my last email was that there should be
less need to explictly disallow vacuum during peak periods since vacuum
will only be occuring on specific tables when needed, which will effect
the server for a much smaller period of time than a general vacuum command
that touches all the tables.

Hi!

Rod Taylor wrote:
> My present theory is that most users make the decision regarding ease of
> use before even installing the software.
>
> If you look at the MySQL website within 1 or 2 clicks, you know that
> there is a gui for queries, a gui for administration, drivers or
> interfaces for many programming langauges. They have GIS, Unicode, full
> text searching, multi-master replication, ANSI compliance, etc.
>
> ...
>
> You don't learn anything about the GUIs (any of them) within the first
> couple of clicks. Since many users (even linux users) associate command
> lines with difficulty of use, the first impression is that PostgreSQL is
> difficult to use.

I think that PostgreSQL's "download" page should point to at least
* Recommended replication solution (erserver?)
* Recommended full-text search solution (tsearch?)
* Recommended GUI / web frontend (PGAdmin / phpPgAdmin)
* Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, whatever
* PostGIS
* Banners to put on the website
* A description of what to find in the contrib dir

If someone makes such a page, I'll promptly add it to the
"next-generation" site.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Here is a blog about a recent MySQL conference with title, "Why MySQL
> Grew So Fast":
>
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4715
>
> and a a Slashdot discussion about it:
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/20/2229212&mode=nested&tid=137&tid=185&tid=187&tid=198
>
> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.

My immediate rhetorical response is "What could the Tortoise learn from
the Hare?"

I think we all know which is which in my question.

> Questions I have are:
>
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?

I'm never sure about this. I think the best marketing is experienced
users selling pg to their bosses one at a time. While our MSSQL servers
at work have died under load innumerable times, our small collection of
postgresql servers (one's so old and embedded it's running 6.4) have been
very reliable. So, slowly but surely, PostgreSQL is proving itself here.

> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?

Enough for me, but I don't think databases should necessarily be all that
easy to use by people who don't understand basic relational theory. So
for me, ease of use means things like transactable DDL and well indexed,
well written documentation. I suspect ease of use for my boss is
something entirely differnt, and may have to do with why he bought the EMS
postgresql manager packages he did.

> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)

Hey, we're like the porridge in goldilock's, just right... :-)

dba folks don't pick MySQL, because it's so limited and basically has
so many bugs (it's a feature that we don't bounds check data!) And it's
pretty easy to get an Oracle guy to play with postgresql when you show him
things like transactionable DDL.

> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

I don't think so. But I'm a database / coder geek. :-)

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Robert Treat wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 05:22, Dennis Bjorklund wrote:
> > On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> >
> > > When I ask about non-standard complience of Pg (turning unquoted
> > > identifiers to lowercase instead of uppercase, violating the SQL
> > > standard, and requring an expensive rewrite of clients), and I get the
> > > answer "uppercase is ugly", I think something is wrong.
> >
> > I would love if someone fixed pg so that one can get the standard
> > behaviour. It would however have to be a setting that can be changed so we
> > are still backward compatible.
> >
> > > that even if I write a patch to start migration, I'm not likely to get
> > > it in.
> >
> > Just changing to uppercase would break old code so such a patch should not
> > just be commited. But would people stop a patch that is backward
> > compatible (in the worst case a setting during initdb)? I'm not so sure
> > they will.
> >
>
> I know this to be true, but don't fully understand it... if our default
> behavior is to fold lower, and we change it to just fold upper... then
> in theory this shouldn't break anything since what used to be folder
> lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
> problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
> practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
> patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
> breaks inside the db.

I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
after the catalogs are setup.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:07:20 -0400
Dave Cramer <pg(at)fastcrypt(dot)com> wrote:
> Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
> windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
> vacuumming at certain times of the day.

It seems to me that the point of pg_autovacuum would be to run 24/7 so
that there is never big hit on the system. Perhaps it could be designed
to throttle itself based on current system usage though.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(at){druid|vex}.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.

Bruce,

Hmmm ... lessons of MySQL:

-- Marketing matters more than technical quality
(not news, Microsoft taught us that)
-- You can often get away with pretending to have features
you don't actually have with enough spin
(Microsoft also outshines MySQL in this area)
-- Educated Database Administrators are in short supply,
and as a result nobody cares about the SQL standard or
relational theory anymore
(Fabian Pascal could have told you that; according to him,
the whole DB industry has been in steady decline since 1994)
-- Commerical companies are uncomfortable with Real Open Source,
and prefer the pseudo-open-source offered by dual-licensing
companies

This last lesson was really driven home to me at the Open Source Business
Convention; managers were slavering all over "dual licensing" as the "new
model of open source." When I pointed out that there's another name for
dual licensing -- "shareware" -- I got some real uncomfortable silences.
Seems that a lot of companies want the fruits of Open Source without changing
the way they do business at all. Big surprise, eh?

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:07:20 -0400
> Dave Cramer <pg(at)fastcrypt(dot)com> wrote:
> > Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
> > windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
> > vacuumming at certain times of the day.
>
> It seems to me that the point of pg_autovacuum would be to run 24/7 so
> that there is never big hit on the system. Perhaps it could be designed
> to throttle itself based on current system usage though.

Or the number of connected backends, or both?

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Stephan Szabo wrote:

>>I know this to be true, but don't fully understand it... if our default
>>behavior is to fold lower, and we change it to just fold upper... then
>>in theory this shouldn't break anything since what used to be folder
>>lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
>>problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
>>practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
>>patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
>>breaks inside the db.
>>
>>
>
>I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
>First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
>potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
>standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
>after the catalogs are setup.
>
>
>

ISTM that rather than a having a GUC setting, initdb would be the right
time to make this choice. I'm not saying it would be easy, but it seems
(without looking into it deeply) at least possible.

cheers

andrew

Josh Berkus wrote:
> This last lesson was really driven home to me at the Open Source Business
> Convention; managers were slavering all over "dual licensing" as the "new
> model of open source." When I pointed out that there's another name for
> dual licensing -- "shareware" -- I got some real uncomfortable silences.
> Seems that a lot of companies want the fruits of Open Source without changing
> the way they do business at all. Big surprise, eh?

Agreed. I see dual-license as an interim step for companies moving from
close to true open source.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 13:08:30 -0400 (EDT)
Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> > It seems to me that the point of pg_autovacuum would be to run 24/7
> > so that there is never big hit on the system. Perhaps it could be
> > designed to throttle itself based on current system usage though.
>
> Or the number of connected backends, or both?

I am sure that there are lots of ways to guage. Not sure which is best
but I am sure that the smart people here will figure it out. The
important thing, I think, is to let the engine make the decision
dynamically. Personally I don't have a "quiet time" per se but there
are random quiet periods. Something that jumps into the fray at those
points would be really nicwe.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(at){druid|vex}.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.

Bruce,

> Agreed. I see dual-license as an interim step for companies moving from
> close to true open source.

Actually, I don't.

As I said, dual-license companies aren't really OSS companies. They are
shareware companies, and as such closer to proprietary software than OSS.
Futher, these shareware companies *never* move in the direction of being more
open as they grow -- they always become more proprietary. See MySQL, VA
Systems, Sendmail for examples. Only BerkelyDB seems to have been able to
avoid getting more proprietary with time.

In fact, I'd say that it's more likely for a 100% proprietary company to
open-source a product than for a shareware company to go fully OSS. See,
for the shareware companies, OSS is a marketing and distribution model to
help them with growing their market share -- and not how their development or
organization works. Once they are established in the market, they will toss
their OSS facade like a successful junior manager dumps his old hand-me-down
suit he wore to the interview when he gets if first paycheck.

For the customers of such shareware, it's really just a cheaper alternative to
existing offerings -- they don't care about or understand OSS, they just want
to be able to license database servers at MySQL's $500 each instead of
Microsoft's $5000 each. The only real benefit is that because shareware
software wraps itself in the rhetoric of Open Source, its introduciton does
open the door for the IT department to sneak in some real Open Source. But
in most cases, Linux opened the door to OSS a while ago.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 13:11, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Stephan Szabo wrote:
>
> >>I know this to be true, but don't fully understand it... if our default
> >>behavior is to fold lower, and we change it to just fold upper... then
> >>in theory this shouldn't break anything since what used to be folder
> >>lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
> >>problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
> >>practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
> >>patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
> >>breaks inside the db.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
> >First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
> >potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
> >standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
> >after the catalogs are setup.
> >
> >
> >
>
> ISTM that rather than a having a GUC setting, initdb would be the right
> time to make this choice. I'm not saying it would be easy, but it seems
> (without looking into it deeply) at least possible.
>

This implies that the standard functions are created with explicit
quoting to make the lower case named? Shouldn't all functions be
created without any quoting so they fold to whichever way the settings
are set? Hmm... I see your angle Andrew.. they are going to be created
one way or the other so you'd be hard pressed to do it at any time other
than initdb time... of course you could just create duplicates of all
the functions in both upper and lower case, that way whichever way you
fold it matches :-)

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us (Bruce Momjian) wrote:
> D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:07:20 -0400
>> Dave Cramer <pg(at)fastcrypt(dot)com> wrote:
>> > Does the current implementation of pg_autovacuum have a way of setting
>> > windows where it is allowed to vacuum? Many large 24/7 will only allow
>> > vacuumming at certain times of the day.
>>
>> It seems to me that the point of pg_autovacuum would be to run 24/7 so
>> that there is never big hit on the system. Perhaps it could be designed
>> to throttle itself based on current system usage though.
>
> Or the number of connected backends, or both?

This is what suggests to me the possibility that perhaps a good
answer would be to redo it in some scripting language, and have the
capability to either:
a) Configure multiple targets via some language-specific approach
(e.g. - reading Perl data structures, or some such thing) or
b) Configure multiple targets via having the configuration stored
in one database/schema.

I would somewhat favor the latter.

The initial design was set up jointly with a view to
a) minimizing the number of extra dependancies, and
b) ultimately being a stop-gap measure until a _proper_ scheme
could get integrated into the postmaster.

The existing implementation has remained sufficiently fragile that we
have a hard time trusting it with the _important_ systems, and since
those systems tend to involve multiple backends, it sure would be nice
to have something that could get run across ALL of them, where we
could be confident that it wouldn't demolish I/O at inconvenient times
by trying to simultaneously vacuum huge tables on multiple backends.

I have lately been working on some (not quite yet sufficiently
generic) tools for managing sets of replication instances; I think I
may want to take a similar "tack" on this. pg_autovacuum has been
handy for systems that I _don't_ want to pay much attention to, but it
hasn't been totally adequate for the more vital ones.
--
If this was helpful, <http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=cbbrowne> rate me
http://cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices
that the system works.

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 13:13, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
> > This last lesson was really driven home to me at the Open Source Business
> > Convention; managers were slavering all over "dual licensing" as the "new
> > model of open source." When I pointed out that there's another name for
> > dual licensing -- "shareware" -- I got some real uncomfortable silences.
> > Seems that a lot of companies want the fruits of Open Source without changing
> > the way they do business at all. Big surprise, eh?
>
> Agreed. I see dual-license as an interim step for companies moving from
> close to true open source.
>

Funny, I've never really felt that way. I don't see all that much
difference between what my$ql does with it's database and what m$ did
with ie or office or <insert m$ product here>... give it away for free
until you get enough market share to start charging more and more. I
guess it's a little better because if the company itself we're ever to
go under people could still take the source and go with it, but still
the dual license scheme to me is just the latest incarnation of a
"loss-leader" marketing plan.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Robert Treat wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 13:11, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
>>Stephan Szabo wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>>I know this to be true, but don't fully understand it... if our default
>>>>behavior is to fold lower, and we change it to just fold upper... then
>>>>in theory this shouldn't break anything since what used to be folder
>>>>lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
>>>>problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
>>>>practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
>>>>patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
>>>>breaks inside the db.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
>>>First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
>>>potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
>>>standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
>>>after the catalogs are setup.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>ISTM that rather than a having a GUC setting, initdb would be the right
>>time to make this choice. I'm not saying it would be easy, but it seems
>>(without looking into it deeply) at least possible.
>>
>>
>>
>
>This implies that the standard functions are created with explicit
>quoting to make the lower case named? Shouldn't all functions be
>created without any quoting so they fold to whichever way the settings
>are set? Hmm... I see your angle Andrew.. they are going to be created
>one way or the other so you'd be hard pressed to do it at any time other
>than initdb time... of course you could just create duplicates of all
>the functions in both upper and lower case, that way whichever way you
>fold it matches :-)
>
>
>

That strikes me as an instant recipe for shooting yourself in the foot,
as well as providing useless catalog bloat. Things need *one* canonical
name, IMNSHO.

cheers

andrew

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 21:09, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Questions I have are:
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?

It is perhaps less a matter of marketing and more a matter of
word-of-mouth mind share. I don't see much evidence of effective direct
marketing, but I've noticed a huge growth in mind share among the
technical crowd over the last few years, which appears to be an
outgrowth of technical reputation.

> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?

No, and I think this is THE biggest impediment to popularity. The real
question should actually be "ease-of-use for who?". I had little
difficulty adapting to Postgres because I have tons of database
experience and so I knew what I was looking for in the technical
documentation, which is quite good for an experienced person. But I
have noticed that most people who have a much more limited experience
with RDBMS administration have a hard time getting started because the
use curve is pretty steep. "Ease of use" isn't an issue for people like
me -- I find it very easy -- but is a significant hurdle for most
everyone else e.g. casual developers.

Some specific recommendations on this:

- Make a standard GUI admin tool a prominent part of the standard
Postgres distribution, something along the lines of pgAdmin. I don't
use it, but a lot of other people need it. For casual database
developers, this will greatly enhance apparent ease of use.

- Pick a procedural language (plpgsql would seem like the obvious
choice) and make it a standard part of a Postgres installation. A
standard procedural language should be an out-of-the-box feature that
"just works". Standard connection drivers (JDBC, ODBC, etc) should also
be installed by default and visible to the user. Doing a "standard"
installation of Postgres for most people requires collecting a half
dozen bits and pieces that would be installed by default or as
install-time options for many databases.

- Make it much easier for the relatively clueless to install options in
their database. Having an official menu of popular add-on modules (e.g.
some of the contrib stuff), and an easy way to automagically enable
these capabilities, will serve to educate users that these features
exist and encourage their use. I find that most new Postgres users
aren't aware that any of these things exist outside of whatever was
included with a vanilla install.

- Expanded documentation and well-indexed how-tos, both for the database
itself and for building applications using the database, for people who
are clueless about the technical details of Postgres internals would be
helpful. The standard documentation tree is a bit too "reference-y" for
less experienced people, and makes certain contextual assumptions that I
find many less experienced trying to navigate it don't have. There is a
gap in the documentation between "total n00b" and "experienced DBA" that
makes it hard to transition that gap.

Postgres actually has very good ease-of-use for experienced DBAs, which
is something that it definitely gets right. And comparing a Postgres
installation to an Oracle installation is like night and day. The
problem is that there is no easy bootstrap path for people who aren't so
experienced with database administration and maintenance in general.

> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)

Postgres should be positioned as an effective alternative to Oracle, and
the focus should be on the "enterprise" database space. Postgres has
some significant leverage points in the enterprise database space, even
today, and as it becomes more feature-complete it will increasingly
become a compelling choice within this space.

Comparing Postgres to MySQL is a mistake IMO, as it leads people to
assume that they are roughly equivalent products. I actually read a
very recent Gartner Group report comparing Postgres and MySQL a couple
months ago that basically said that Postgres and MySQL are equivalent
products, but MySQL is easier to use. And their reasoning basically
cited the myriad of MySQL versus Postgres comparisons on the 'net. The
suits who did the research had difficulty evaluating the technical
merits and so they based relative equivalence on the fact that they were
constantly compared to each other in the same light.

>From a marketing standpoint, I would focus all my effort on comparisons
to commercial enterprise DB engines like Oracle and ignore MySQL. This
will define Postgres as a part of the enterprise market and remove it
from the same market space that MySQL occupies.

> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

No. The greatest strength of Postgres, marketing-wise, are technical
and is what drives its growth today. I think most of the ease-of-use
issues are in the packaging of the larger Postgres product and mid-level
developer documentation, both of which seem to be eminently solvable
problems. I think improved default product packaging would remove 80%
of the impediment to more widespread adoption.

There is no *technical* reason things should be done this way and it
might even go against the sensibilities of many current users. But it
would go a long way toward widening the audience.

j. andrew rogers

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 12:07, Alexey Borzov wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Rod Taylor wrote:
> > My present theory is that most users make the decision regarding ease of
> > use before even installing the software.
> >
> > If you look at the MySQL website within 1 or 2 clicks, you know that
> > there is a gui for queries, a gui for administration, drivers or
> > interfaces for many programming langauges. They have GIS, Unicode, full
> > text searching, multi-master replication, ANSI compliance, etc.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > You don't learn anything about the GUIs (any of them) within the first
> > couple of clicks. Since many users (even linux users) associate command
> > lines with difficulty of use, the first impression is that PostgreSQL is
> > difficult to use.
>
> I think that PostgreSQL's "download" page should point to at least
> * Recommended replication solution (erserver?)
> * Recommended full-text search solution (tsearch?)
> * Recommended GUI / web frontend (PGAdmin / phpPgAdmin)
> * Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, whatever
> * PostGIS
> * Banners to put on the website
> * A description of what to find in the contrib dir
>
> If someone makes such a page, I'll promptly add it to the
> "next-generation" site.
>

Do you think you could mock one up with fake projects and links? It
would make it easier to wrap our heads around how that would work with
translations and mirroring.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 14:28, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> of course you could just create duplicates of all
> >the functions in both upper and lower case, that way whichever way you
> >fold it matches :-)
> >
>
> That strikes me as an instant recipe for shooting yourself in the foot,
> as well as providing useless catalog bloat. Things need *one* canonical
> name, IMNSHO.
>

hence the smiley...

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Folks,

> > * Recommended replication solution (erserver?)
> > * Recommended full-text search solution (tsearch?)
> > * Recommended GUI / web frontend (PGAdmin / phpPgAdmin)
> > * Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, whatever
> > * PostGIS
> > * Banners to put on the website
> > * A description of what to find in the contrib dir

I'm really nervous about pointing to "recommended" solutions where we have
several. I'd rather have links to all mature projects in that category.

Replication is actually several different problems demanding several different
solutions. So no one replication solution is going to cover all needs,
ever.

For GUIs, we have an embarassment of them, and I would not want to be
responsible for telling anyone their project is "not recommended". That's an
effective way of making a lot of enemies in the OSS community. Instead, I
might suggest listing all OSS GUIs in order of popularity -- which still lets
PGAdmin & phpPGAdmin float to the top, but without telling Xpg or PGAccess to
take a flying leap into the void.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 02:35:48PM +0800, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> >My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> >anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
> >
> >Questions I have are:
>
> I have already told Bruce at length about the single most common
> complaint in the phpPgAdmin lists and in the IRC channel: the inability
> to change column types. I think we should listen to the punters on that
> one.
>
> Also, how about a new section in the manual: PostgreSQL for MySQL users
> and PostgreSQL for Oracle users?

Maybe also a more generic section about how PGSQL is different from
other databases. Maybe I'm just dense, but it took me a long time to
figure out the whole lack of stored procedures thing (yes, PGSQL
obviously has the functionality, but many experienced DBAs won't
associate functions with stored procs). Pointing out the documentation
on MVCC and how it changes how you want to use the database would be
good, as would links to documentation on what postgresql.conf settings
you want to change out of the box.

On the other topics...
I think the biggest service PGSQL could provide to the open source
community is a resource that teaches people with no database experience
the fundamentals of databases. If people had an understanding of what a
RDBMS should be capable of and how it should be used, they wouldn't pick
MySQL.

Having a windows port is critical for 'student mindshare'. If PGSQL can't
play on windows, professors can't use it. Likewise, installation on OS X
should be made as easy as possible.

That's for the 'low end' users (many of whom will eventually become
'high end'). For professionals who have database expertise, the
comparison guide will help a lot. The other thing that will help is
continuing to bring enterprise-class features in, like multi-master
replication, partitioning, and clustering. But since people tend to
think most about the technology, I'm sure those will make it in
eventually anyway. :)
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant jim(at)nasby(dot)net
Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"

Stephan Szabo wrote:

>I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
>First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
>potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
>standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
>after the catalogs are setup.
>
>
That's not the migration path I was thinking of.

What I was thinking of was:
1. Have a setting, probably per-session. Per database works too.
2. Aside from the folder upper and folder lower, have a third option.
This is "fold upper, if fails, fold lower. If succeeds, issue a
warning". This should allow programs that rely on the folding (such as
initdb) to be debugged during the transition period.

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

Hi!

Robert Treat wrote:
> Do you think you could mock one up with fake projects and links? It
> would make it easier to wrap our heads around how that would work with
> translations and mirroring.

Sorry, right now I'm working on admin interface for postgresql.org, then I'll be
doing static mirror building stuff.

I meant this page will come instead of mirror selection, when the visitor clicks
on Download. If he decides to download PostgreSQL itself, he will hit the
current mirror selection page.

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 07:13, Fabien COELHO wrote:

> Yes. I really thing that it should be on by default, because those who
> will need it more than others are those who will not know about tuning
> configuration parameters. As I understand the requirements from
> pg_autovacuum, it means that some statistics will have to be on by default
> as well.
>

The debian package automatically makes a vacuum entry in the crontab.
So, to a certain extent, this could be solved at the distribution level.

However, the pg_autovacuum project will be a great improvement over
that. Right now, the distributions mostly care about MySQL, so it will
be nice to have postgresql handle that detail.

Jeff

Hi!

Josh Berkus wrote:
>>>* Recommended replication solution (erserver?)
>>>* Recommended full-text search solution (tsearch?)
>>>* Recommended GUI / web frontend (PGAdmin / phpPgAdmin)
>>>* Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, whatever
>>>* PostGIS
>>>* Banners to put on the website
>>>* A description of what to find in the contrib dir
>
> I'm really nervous about pointing to "recommended" solutions where we have
> several. I'd rather have links to all mature projects in that category.

Okay, s/recommended/mature/

> Replication is actually several different problems demanding several different
> solutions. So no one replication solution is going to cover all needs,
> ever.

Okay, but currently *the* replication solution that's linked from every page of
postgresql.org is pgreplication. Which is either dead or just stinks like one.

> For GUIs, we have an embarassment of them, and I would not want to be
> responsible for telling anyone their project is "not recommended". That's an
> effective way of making a lot of enemies in the OSS community. Instead, I
> might suggest listing all OSS GUIs in order of popularity -- which still lets
> PGAdmin & phpPGAdmin float to the top, but without telling Xpg or PGAccess to
> take a flying leap into the void.

Who will define "popularity"?

Of course, it is possible to just create a page for all the GUIs, but it will
require discipline or else it will degenerate to
http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/related.html
or
http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/interfaces.html

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> Stephan Szabo wrote:
>
> >I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
> >First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
> >potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
> >standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
> >after the catalogs are setup.
> >
> >
> That's not the migration path I was thinking of.
>
> What I was thinking of was:
> 1. Have a setting, probably per-session. Per database works too.
> 2. Aside from the folder upper and folder lower, have a third option.
> This is "fold upper, if fails, fold lower. If succeeds, issue a
> warning". This should allow programs that rely on the folding (such as
> initdb) to be debugged during the transition period.

If you can do this in a clean fashion without tromping all around the
code, that'd be reasonable, however, istm that you'd need to either
pre-fold both directions from the given identifier string and pass an
extra copy around or pass the original identifier and its quoted status
and fold on use. I think either of these are likely to be very intrusive
for what essentially amounts to a transitional feature.

In addition, I'm not sure that this would always work in any case, since
some of those usages may be quoted identifiers that were once generated
from a case-folded string (for example, looking up a name in the catalogs
and quoting it).

Forgive my crappy HTML. But this is along the lines of what I was
thinking.

> Do you think you could mock one up with fake projects and links? It
> would make it easier to wrap our heads around how that would work with
> translations and mirroring.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Stephan Szabo wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> > Stephan Szabo wrote:
> >
> > >I've tried just changing the parser to unconditionally casefold to upper.
> > >First thing that happens is that initdb breaks. In addition, you have
> > >potential issues with comparisons against the catalog's versions of
> > >standard functions as such if you allow the case folding to be changed
> > >after the catalogs are setup.
> > >
> > >
> > That's not the migration path I was thinking of.
> >
> > What I was thinking of was:
> > 1. Have a setting, probably per-session. Per database works too.
> > 2. Aside from the folder upper and folder lower, have a third option.
> > This is "fold upper, if fails, fold lower. If succeeds, issue a
> > warning". This should allow programs that rely on the folding (such as
> > initdb) to be debugged during the transition period.
>
> If you can do this in a clean fashion without tromping all around the
> code, that'd be reasonable, however, istm that you'd need to either
> pre-fold both directions from the given identifier string and pass an
> extra copy around or pass the original identifier and its quoted status
> and fold on use. I think either of these are likely to be very intrusive
> for what essentially amounts to a transitional feature.
>
> In addition, I'm not sure that this would always work in any case, since
> some of those usages may be quoted identifiers that were once generated
> from a case-folded string (for example, looking up a name in the catalogs
> and quoting it).

To clarify, I'm thinking about things where an application had gotten a
quoted name and is now trying to use it where the object's canonical name
was changed due to quoting changes. This only happens when quoting
is inconsistently applied, but that's most of the problem.

I have been thinking about this subject for a LONG time, and I hope I have
something to contribute.
>
> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> Questions I have are:
>
> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?

I would say this is a clear 'NO!' When ever I read about open-source being
used anywhere, I always read MySQL. They are *very* good at this.

> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?

Again, NO! To often you guys settle for a work-around rather than a
feature. You are satisfied that symlinks will do the job. When someone
says they want a feature, you say, no - use a symlink.

Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
MSSQL all have nice setup programs.

I know a bit about this, as I made a "PostgreSQL for Windows" (It was
7.3.x) CD a while back. I had to do a lot of work on the postgresql
configuration, database initialization, and create a demo database. It
used a minimal cygwin environment, a Windows based installer, and some
custom function libraries. I tried to submit the configuration patch and
all I got was argument about using symlinks or how it wasn't needed.

The thing that kind of bugs me about this O/S project is that you guys are
a bit nit-picking about how someone uses it. I believe in the UNIX
phylosophy: capability not policy, flexability, etc. You guys seem to need
an absolute reason to include something, rather than a good reason to
exclude something. A lot of open source developers are turned off by this
sort of attitude.

> o How do we position ourselves against a database that some
> say is "good enough" (MySQL), and another one that some
> say is "too much" (Oracle)

My argument against this is that MySQL is no less complicated than
PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL, in production is faster than MySQL, even though
MySQL may be marginally faster on some simple queries. The system resource
usage of both systems is very similar. PostgreSQL, however, boasts a lot
of standard features that make using it much easier.

> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

For the most part, you guys do a great, no .. fantastic, job at the
technical details of the database. Even though I get frustrated, I know it
is a great system. You *should* be technically driven.

If you want to blow the competition out of the water, you need a
non-forked Windows version of the database. You need a Java (or some other
portable environment) installer. You need to get out of the
hand-administered mentality of using symlinks and system level constructs.

One should be able to install the software, bring up a nice configuration
program which runs you through a few questions, and be done. This same
configuration program should be able to help maintain and control an the
installation. On Windows, have a service monitor program that starts and
stops the server, on UNIX, have it able to start/stop via init.d.
Everything else is "expert level."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi,

- -- Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> o Are we marketing ourselves properly?

while talking about MySQL, there is the myth, that MySQL is fast; and that
because MyISAM has no transactions, that it is faster.

That is in most cases not true! And for all real live scenarios I know and I
tested, Postgres was faster.

An example: a critical calculation in one of my online projects needs with
MySQL (MyISAM Table Type) about 2.7 to 2.8 seconds (group by on 500000 rows
for some realtime statistics). But on this time, the complete table is write
locked (because MyISAM) :-(

With InnoDB the same needs at least 15 to 20 seconds, but other users can
insert/update.

With PostgreSQL (7.4) it took 1.9 to 2 seconds. Parallel inserts/updates no
problem.

The only reason why I changed the whole stuff to Postgres yet is, that there
are a lot of problems with MySQL special "features" (see the Gotchas:
http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html)

Other example: Some days ago I had a talk with my project leader; I said,
that for a new application we should *everything* build with transactions,
referential integrity, ... -- his answer: "I want to have a fast
application". AAARRGH! ;-(

So, perhaps it might be a good idea to create a page with feature- and
performance comparison.
I planed to create an independant and RDBMS benchmark suite (as Free Software
including the datas for testing), but I'm not sure if this project ever come
true ...

> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?

I'm not sure about the focus; but the result can be better.

When installing and using any type of software, I want that this is as easy
as possible while it helps me to understand as much of the backgrounds as
possible.

Whats about the initdb, postgresql.conf and startup scripts?

So, It might be good to have a GUI-Tool (!) in the standard package, which
makes an initdb with selectable options and helps the user to set the
required options in the postgresql.conf.

I'm a computer freak since the mod 80s and I can edit config files. But to
have a GUI tool with some explaining texts at the buttons etc is much easyer
than hacking a textfile.

Also the other stuff mentioned in this thread are important: auto vacuum,
windows port, better default values etc.

Ease-of-use includes for me localisation and documentation in different
languages. As you can see, my english is junky -- so reading german
documentation is a lot of easyer for me ;-)

> o Are our priorities too technically driven?

AFAIK it is good to have the priorities technically driven -- if nobody
forgets the userfriendlyness ;)

Ciao
Alvar

- --
** Alvar C.H. Freude -- http://alvar.a-blast.org/ -- http://odem.org/
** Berufsverbot? http://odem.org/aktuelles/staatsanwalt.de.html
** ODEM.org-Tour: http://tour.odem.org/
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Hi,

- -- pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:

> I would say this is a clear 'NO!' When ever I read about open-source being
> used anywhere, I always read MySQL. They are *very* good at this.

yes!
Some days ago, there was a news in the Heise Newsticker (most important IT
news in germany), about MySQL clustering.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46511

"4*2 processors with 100000 replicated transactions per second" was the main
statement.

I'm sure, that this is the typical MySQL blabla: no transactions, but select
statements ...

<http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=5487088&forum_id
=55321>

I'm not sure, if iot is a good idea to go down with the niveau to such lies.

>> o Are we focused enough on ease-of-use issues?
>
> Again, NO! To often you guys settle for a work-around rather than a
> feature. You are satisfied that symlinks will do the job. When someone
> says they want a feature, you say, no - use a symlink.

[...]

yes, you are right!

One additional thing: when updating from 7.x to 7.y, a new initdb is needed.
This means: If I have some GB Data, the RDBMS is some ours down for
upgrading. This is really no good situation. There should be a way for
converting the storage on the fly: Updating and let postgres do the rest
automaically.

I guess this is not really easy; but it is important!

Ciao
Alvar

- --
** Alvar C.H. Freude -- http://alvar.a-blast.org/ -- http://odem.org/
** Berufsverbot? http://odem.org/aktuelles/staatsanwalt.de.html
** ODEM.org-Tour: http://tour.odem.org/
** 5 Jahre Blaster: http://www.a-blast.de/ | http://www.a-blast.de/statistik/

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Alexey Borzov wrote:
> I think that PostgreSQL's "download" page should point to at least
> * Recommended replication solution (erserver?)
> * Recommended full-text search solution (tsearch?)
> * Recommended GUI / web frontend (PGAdmin / phpPgAdmin)
> * Drivers: ODBC, JDBC, whatever
> * PostGIS
> * Banners to put on the website
> * A description of what to find in the contrib dir

A couple of months ago I grew tired of having to find all the PostgreSQL
pieces all over the net, plus having to get them to get along with each
other and the rest of the system. So I started packaging and
collecting them here: <http://www.unitedpostgresql.org/>. It's already
saved me a bunch of time. Feel free to take from it.

On Friday 23 April 2004 16:05, Alexey Borzov wrote:
> Josh Berkus wrote:
> >
> > I'm really nervous about pointing to "recommended" solutions where we
> > have several. I'd rather have links to all mature projects in that
> > category.
>
> Okay, s/recommended/mature/
>

good suggestion.

> > Replication is actually several different problems demanding several
> > different solutions. So no one replication solution is going to cover
> > all needs, ever.
>
> Okay, but currently *the* replication solution that's linked from every
> page of postgresql.org is pgreplication. Which is either dead or just
> stinks like one.
>
> > For GUIs, we have an embarassment of them, and I would not want to be
> > responsible for telling anyone their project is "not recommended".
> > That's an effective way of making a lot of enemies in the OSS community.
> > Instead, I might suggest listing all OSS GUIs in order of popularity --
> > which still lets PGAdmin & phpPGAdmin float to the top, but without
> > telling Xpg or PGAccess to take a flying leap into the void.
>

josh, did you see... rod taylor i think... post in advocacy about criteria for
such a page. the first 6 seemed pretty good.

> Who will define "popularity"?
>
> Of course, it is possible to just create a page for all the GUIs, but it
> will require discipline or else it will degenerate to
> http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/related.html
> or
> http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/interfaces.html

you mean like http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/GUITools ?

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Stephan Szabo <sszabo(at)megazone(dot)bigpanda(dot)com> writes:
> To clarify, I'm thinking about things where an application had gotten a
> quoted name and is now trying to use it where the object's canonical name
> was changed due to quoting changes. This only happens when quoting
> is inconsistently applied, but that's most of the problem.

Actually, that's *all* the problem, at least as far as SQL commands are
concerned. If you are consistent about always quoting or never quoting
a particular name, you can't tell the difference between PG's behavior
and SQL-spec behavior.

Aside from the reality that apps aren't very consistent about their
quoting behavior, the fly in this ointment is that whenever you query
the database catalogs you will see the stored spelling of the name.
So apps that rely on seeing the same spelling in the catalog that they
entered could break. (In practice this doesn't seem to be as big a
problem as the sloppy-quoting-behavior issue, though.)

Personally I don't think that this is a "transitional issue" and we will
someday all be happy in upper-case-only-land. Upper-case-only sucks,
by every known measure of readability, and I don't want to have to put up
with a database that forces that 1960s-vintage-hardware mindset on me.
So what I'm holding out for is a design that lets me continue to see the
current behavior if I set a GUC variable that says that's what I want.
This seems possible (not easy, but possible) if we are willing to
require the choice to be made at compile time ... but that sounds too
restrictive to satisfy anybody ... what we need is a design that
supports such a choice per-session, and I dunno how to do that.

regards, tom lane

PS: I resisted the temptation to SET THIS MESSAGE IN ALL UPPER CASE
to make the point about readability. But if you want to argue the
point with me, I'll be happy to do that for the rest of the thread.

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

> Upper-case-only sucks, by every known measure of readability, and I
> don't want to have to put up with a database that forces that
> 1960s-vintage-hardware mindset on me.

Well, get used to it :-)

> So what I'm holding out for is a design that lets me continue to see the
> current behavior if I set a GUC variable that says that's what I want.

Wouldn't the upper case identifiers just be visible in the \d output,
table headers and such. You could still have psql tab completion produce
lower case identifiers (if told using some setting).

Even if the database store all non quoted names as upper case I would
still use lower case in all applications and on the psql command line.

It's not a big problem for me if the output of \d and the table headers
and such is in upper case. One would get used to it fase. And maybe one
can even store an extra bit telling if the string was created with or
without quotes and have psql lower case all the ones created without
quotes.

First I thought that one can store the string with case all the time, and
just convert when needed (when comparing identifiers). Perhaps using the
non existant locale support and locales such as SQL_UPPER or SQL_MIXED.
But it wont work since it would make "Foo" and Foo clash. When translated
directly it would create separate entries "Foo" and "FOO".

ps. And if you want to play the WRITE MAILS USING ONLY UPPER CASE, BE MY
GUEST!

--
/Dennis Björklund

Tom Lane wrote:

>Personally I don't think that this is a "transitional issue" and we will
>someday all be happy in upper-case-only-land. Upper-case-only sucks,
>by every known measure of readability, and I don't want to have to put up
>with a database that forces that 1960s-vintage-hardware mindset on me.
>
>
And I was feeling apologetic that I was accusing without a base the good
(and I'm not cynical about that last adjective) people of the PostgreSQL
of making life more difficult for programmers just because they don't
like the asthetics of something which an external standard dictates.

I mean, sure, I understand the sentiment. I don't like seeing all-caps
either. But allow me to give an allegory from another free software
project, one where I am an actual active code contributer.

Imagine that Alexandre Juliard, the benevolent dictator for the Wine
project, would have had the same attitude. Each time someone would come
around saying "today function X calls function Y, and this breaks
program Z. We need to reverse X and Y", he would reply with "But it
makes more asthetic/program design/whatever sense to do it the way we do
it today". The result would be that Wine would never come to the point
where it can run Word, IE and other prominant Windows only applications.

The reality of things is that Wine, just like Postgres, work by an
external standard. Wine's standard is more strict, less documented, and
more broad. However, like it or not, the more you deviate from the
standard, the more you require people who want to use your technology to
adapt to whatever it is that you do.

This doesn't make sense on any level.

>So what I'm holding out for is a design that lets me continue to see the
>current behavior if I set a GUC variable that says that's what I want.
>
>
>This seems possible (not easy, but possible) if we are willing to
>require the choice to be made at compile time ... but that sounds too
>restrictive to satisfy anybody ... what we need is a design that
>supports such a choice per-session, and I dunno how to do that.
>
>
In other words, you are going to reject the simpler solutions that treat
this as a transition problem, because of asthetic issue? Not even
program design issue, mind you. Sounds strange to me, and also pretty
much guarentees that this will never happen. That would be a shame.

The reason this would be a shame is because postgres is the same reason
this thread was CCed to advocacy to begin with. Databases form a pretty
saturated field. If Postgres is to break forward, it needs a niche. The
fully-featured databases role is taken (Oracle), and the free database
role is taken (MySQL). Postgres CAN take the fuly featured free database
niche, but that will need help.

The time is ripe, however. The company we're doing my current OLE DB
work for has contacted me about this, and they dictated Postgres (MySQL
was not nearly enough). They still want to see proof of concept working,
but that's my job. However, I'm afraid they might give up if things
become too complicated to port. Under such circumstances, every little
help Postgres can give may mean the difference between "breaking
through" and "staying behind". I really wouldn't like to see such an
important help break merely because "Tom Lane doesn't like to see
uppercase on his database tables list".

Now, I'm intending to do the best I can on my end. This does have a
pretty heavy cost. It means that the OLE DB driver will parse in details
each query, and perform replacements on the query text. This is bug
prone, difficult, hurts performance, and just plain wrong from a
software design perspective. The current drift of wind, however, means
that the PostgreSQL steering commite seems to prefer having a lesser
quality driver to seeing ugly uppercase.

> regards, tom lane
>
>PS: I resisted the temptation to SET THIS MESSAGE IN ALL UPPER CASE
>to make the point about readability. But if you want to argue the
>point with me, I'll be happy to do that for the rest of the thread.
>
>
Yes, it's a well known rhetoric technique. Take whatever argument your
opponent say, and exagerate it to an absurd.

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

Dennis Bjorklund <db(at)zigo(dot)dhs(dot)org> writes:
> On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Tom Lane wrote:
>> So what I'm holding out for is a design that lets me continue to see the
>> current behavior if I set a GUC variable that says that's what I want.

> Wouldn't the upper case identifiers just be visible in the \d output,
> table headers and such.

Exactly ... and that's where my readability complaint starts ...

> First I thought that one can store the string with case all the time, and
> just convert when needed (when comparing identifiers).

People keep suggesting these random not-quite-standard behaviors, but
I fail to see the point. Are you arguing for exact standards
compliance, or not? If you're not, then you have to make your case on
the claim that "my nonstandard behavior is better than the existing
nonstandard behavior". Which might be true, beauty being in the eye of
the beholder, but I doubt you can prove it to the extent of overriding
the backwards-compatibility issue.

regards, tom lane

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

> > First I thought that one can store the string with case all the time, and
> > just convert when needed (when comparing identifiers).
>
> People keep suggesting these random not-quite-standard behaviors, but
> I fail to see the point. Are you arguing for exact standards
> compliance, or not?

That was me making conversation, pointing out something that does not
work. Since it does not work I don't want it to be implemented. And with
work I mean not follow the standard.

For something to follow standard it has to behave the correct way to the
outside, how it's implemented is a different matter. The above does not
work. Period.

--
/Dennis Björklund

Tom Lane wrote:
> Aside from the reality that apps aren't very consistent about their
> quoting behavior, the fly in this ointment is that whenever you query
> the database catalogs you will see the stored spelling of the name.
> So apps that rely on seeing the same spelling in the catalog that they
> entered could break. (In practice this doesn't seem to be as big a
> problem as the sloppy-quoting-behavior issue, though.)

Shouldn't apps only really be querying the information schema if they're
expecting spec compliant behavior? If so, a GUC variable with an access
function ought to be enough to get up or down casing as desired, I'd think.

Joe

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> Tom Lane wrote:
> >So what I'm holding out for is a design that lets me continue to see the
> >current behavior if I set a GUC variable that says that's what I want.
> >
> >This seems possible (not easy, but possible) if we are willing to
> >require the choice to be made at compile time ... but that sounds too
> >restrictive to satisfy anybody ... what we need is a design that
> >supports such a choice per-session, and I dunno how to do that.
> >
> >
> In other words, you are going to reject the simpler solutions that treat
> this as a transition problem, because of asthetic issue? Not even
> program design issue, mind you. Sounds strange to me, and also pretty
> much guarentees that this will never happen. That would be a shame.

[ Tom, we know your opinion on the first part of the next paragraph, so
you don't need to reply to that part. ;) ]

Are we going to get rid of the current behavior entirely? If so, how are
we going to handle issues like current databases with names like foo and
"FOO" (and what if the name was given as "foo")? If not, when can one set
the folding options and how do we (in the long term) make the database
work properly in both settings. Things like "don't worry about the catalog
entries" don't fly when your standard functions are defined and
looked up there.

Depending on the answers to the above, we need to think about things like
the transitional plans put forth. Do these plans actually help transition
things. The fold up and down compare one then the other on a failure of
the first may be fairly invasive changes, still has problems when quotes
are used inconsistently and can also silently change behavior from old
versions (on that database mentioned above, what does select * from foo
do, is it the same as before?). These may or may not be huge issues and it
may or may not be easily solvable, but these things need to be figured out
IMHO before something can be considered a solution.

Stephan Szabo wrote:

>[ Tom, we know your opinion on the first part of the next paragraph, so
>you don't need to reply to that part. ;) ]
>
>Are we going to get rid of the current behavior entirely?
>
I doubt that will be a good idea. You want to let applications created
for previous versions of PostgreSQL continue to work. The idea, I think,
is to have either a DB wide, or a session wide, option to have it either
way. We may have to create a DB conversion tool, that converts a DB from
one way to the other (and changes the case of functions, along the way).

> If so, how are
>we going to handle issues like current databases with names like foo and
>"FOO" (and what if the name was given as "foo")?
>
I think these are really rare. The conversion tool can warn about these
cases.

> If not, when can one set
>the folding options and how do we (in the long term) make the database
>work properly in both settings.
>
I don't think having the same DB work in both folding options is really
a big issue. Having two databases on the same server, one this way and
one the other is, however. You don't want to install two database
servers, merely because you have two applications developed for two
different PG versions.

> Things like "don't worry about the catalog
>entries" don't fly when your standard functions are defined and
>looked up there.
>
>
Answer above.

>Depending on the answers to the above, we need to think about things like
>the transitional plans put forth. Do these plans actually help transition
>things.
>
I think they do. The idea is to be as complaining and as verbose during
transition as possible. Ideally, if some breakpoint can be triggered
each time a double lookup takes place (thus knowing that the client app
is calling the wrong way), this will allow converting apps in almost no
time at all.

> The fold up and down compare one then the other on a failure of
>the first may be fairly invasive changes,
>
In what way invasive?

> still has problems when quotes
>are used inconsistently
>
The main issue, as far as I'm concerned, is not with PG apps that need
to be ported to the new scheme. I don't have any qualm with never
deprecating the lowercase folding. This, of course, puts a burden on
utilities that work as infrastructure to always quote or always
not-quote (depending on exact semantics), but that, I believe, is solveable.

My problem is with applications written for other, more standard
complient, databases, and with porting these into PG. As such, if the
app uses inconsistent quoting, it today relies on uppercase folding, and
will not have any problem.

> and can also silently change behavior from old
>versions (on that database mentioned above, what does select * from foo
>do, is it the same as before?). These may or may not be huge issues and it
>may or may not be easily solvable, but these things need to be figured out
>IMHO before something can be considered a solution.
>
>
I agree. It's just that I don't think this is a big issue, given the
fact that I don't think we intend to deprecate the lowercase folding any
time soon.

Shachar

Remove advocacy from the CC. I don't think it's related there any more.

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

On Saturday 24 April 2004 01:23, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> >PS: I resisted the temptation to SET THIS MESSAGE IN ALL UPPER CASE
> >to make the point about readability. But if you want to argue the
> >point with me, I'll be happy to do that for the rest of the thread.
>
> Yes, it's a well known rhetoric technique. Take whatever argument your
> opponent say, and exagerate it to an absurd.
>

Kind of like changing the subject line of a thread to imply your side of the
argument is the one that has technical merit and the other side is being
petty and/or frivolous? Anyone who has studied software useability will
know that uppercase should, in general, be avoided as it hurts readability.
It isn't about "looking pretty", it's about being more usable.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Robert Treat wrote:

>On Saturday 24 April 2004 01:23, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
>
>>Tom Lane wrote:
>>
>>
>>>PS: I resisted the temptation to SET THIS MESSAGE IN ALL UPPER CASE
>>>to make the point about readability. But if you want to argue the
>>>point with me, I'll be happy to do that for the rest of the thread.
>>>
>>>
>>Yes, it's a well known rhetoric technique. Take whatever argument your
>>opponent say, and exagerate it to an absurd.
>>
>>
>>
>
>Kind of like changing the subject line of a thread to imply your side of the
>argument is the one that has technical merit and the other side is being
>petty and/or frivolous?
>
It is my understanding that the discussion with Tom was 100% about the
question in the subject line. There is no question that the SQL standard
dictates that unquoted identifiers should be folded to uppercase. There
is no question (not from me) that upper case is ugly. The only question
is whether we should prefer standard to asthetic.

> Anyone who has studied software useability will
>know that uppercase should, in general, be avoided as it hurts readability.
>
>
You convinced me! let's change the SQL standard.

>It isn't about "looking pretty", it's about being more usable.
>
>Robert Treat
>
>
Ok. I'm willing to change the subject to "are hurting eyes due to
uppercase preferable to changing lots of code when migrating to PG from
other database due to standard incomplience", if it would make you feel
better.

The point is that I am not against lower case, or pro uppercase. I HATE
uppercase. I do think, however, that standards should be followed. The
question is, when all is said and done, which is more useable. A DB that
presents unquoted identifiers as uppercase, or one that allows easier
migration of client apps from other DBs.

I'll also mention that if asthetic/readability is all that bothers you,
we can add a flag to psql that displays all caps as lowercase.

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

On Saturday 24 April 2004 08:09, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> > Anyone who has studied software useability will
> >know that uppercase should, in general, be avoided as it hurts
> > readability.
>
> You convinced me! let's change the SQL standard.
>

We plan to, right after we have PostgreSQL achieve world domination. But we
can't abondon lower case now or it will weaken the argument when that time
comes. :-)

>
> Ok. I'm willing to change the subject to "are hurting eyes due to
> uppercase preferable to changing lots of code when migrating to PG from
> other database due to standard incomplience", if it would make you feel
> better.
>

ouch. s/code when/code from crappily written apps when/ :-)

> The point is that I am not against lower case, or pro uppercase. I HATE
> uppercase. I do think, however, that standards should be followed. The
> question is, when all is said and done, which is more useable. A DB that
> presents unquoted identifiers as uppercase, or one that allows easier
> migration of client apps from other DBs.
>

IMHO apps that apply quoted identifiers willy nilly are busted anyway, and it
is only by coincidence that they work on other databases if they work at all.
(And it's by extremely unfortunate coincidence that they might be spec
complient in that behavior.. but hey.)

Oh well... let's see if we can find a way to support both...

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Robert Treat wrote:

>IMHO apps that apply quoted identifiers willy nilly are busted anyway,
>
Not really. Sometimes the app itself will be very consistent, never
applying quotes, but an underlying driver will always apply quotes. The
result is a mixed behaviour. There is nothing you or me can do about
that. Notice that in the above case, neither app nor driver are
violating their mandate, and both are well within their right to do so.

So long as the behaviour is regulated by a standard, there is nothing
you and I can say against such practices.

>Oh well... let's see if we can find a way to support both...
>
>
>
You are welcome to join the other leg of this thread, then. That one is
not CCed to advocacy, as it is 100% technical.

>Robert Treat
>
>
Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 10:56:43PM -0700, Joe Conway wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> >Aside from the reality that apps aren't very consistent about their
> >quoting behavior, the fly in this ointment is that whenever you query
> >the database catalogs you will see the stored spelling of the name.
> >So apps that rely on seeing the same spelling in the catalog that they
> >entered could break. (In practice this doesn't seem to be as big a
> >problem as the sloppy-quoting-behavior issue, though.)
>
> Shouldn't apps only really be querying the information schema if they're
> expecting spec compliant behavior? If so, a GUC variable with an access
> function ought to be enough to get up or down casing as desired, I'd think.

Some questions:

Is there a way to make this work? At what level should the current
system be modified? If the parser or lexer is to be modified, are they
going to need database access? They are not allowed to, AFAIR.

One could invent a GUC setting for this, and have it set at database
creation time. How would shared catalogs be handled? Should we have a
template database for uppercase and another one for lower case
databases? Should non-shared catalogs be handled in a special way?

Or maybe it is a compilation switch. What issues would arise?

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They
got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you
tell them how idealistic you are." -- Charles J. Sykes' advice to teenagers

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> Stephan Szabo wrote:
>
> >Are we going to get rid of the current behavior entirely?
> >
> I doubt that will be a good idea. You want to let applications created
> for previous versions of PostgreSQL continue to work. The idea, I think,
> is to have either a DB wide, or a session wide, option to have it either
> way. We may have to create a DB conversion tool, that converts a DB from
> one way to the other (and changes the case of functions, along the way).

I'm going to assume that we're making the assumption that the user isn't
going to try to do this on databases where it doesn't work? I think we've
lost any information about quoting (was that named "foo" or foo?) so I
don't think we can meaningfully make a current PostgreSQL app that's
inconsistent about quoting work after the conversion. I think this is
reasonable, but others may disagree.

> > If so, how are
> >we going to handle issues like current databases with names like foo and
> >"FOO" (and what if the name was given as "foo")?
> >
> I think these are really rare. The conversion tool can warn about these
> cases.

I agree, but we need to think about these cases (and any other wacky cases
like this) so that we can warn about these cases rather than just not
handle them.

> > If not, when can one set
> >the folding options and how do we (in the long term) make the database
> >work properly in both settings.
> >
> I don't think having the same DB work in both folding options is really
> a big issue. Having two databases on the same server, one this way and
> one the other is, however. You don't want to install two database
> servers, merely because you have two applications developed for two
> different PG versions.

To be honest for me, it really doesn't feel much different than an app
written for 7.2 and one written for 7.4 where the former uses things that
were removed and so cannot be moved to 7.4 without changes. But that's
just an option.

> > Things like "don't worry about the catalog
> >entries" don't fly when your standard functions are defined and
> >looked up there.
> >
> >
> Answer above.

Okay, under that world view (as opposed to on the fly), I think the only
issues come in from shared catalogs, most importantly user names. This is
certainly solvable, but we need to consider how we handle them when given
to commands like ALTER USER or CREATE USER.

> > The fold up and down compare one then the other on a failure of the
> >first may be fairly invasive changes,
> >
> In what way invasive?

Right now AFAIK most of the case folding stuff pretty much happens in one
place during normal queries and the identifier string you get out has the
post-folding identifier for unquoted or the contained literal for quoted.

In a system where you fold both directions, I can see a few
obvious options:
a) keep around the real identifier that was given plus whether or
not it was quoted.
b) keep around both folded identifiers (for non-quoted names).
c) fold one direction then the other. This may potentially do the
wrong thing in some locales

I don't know how you were planning to handle this issue so I don't know if
any of these scenarios were what you were thinking of or if you had a
better idea. I think all of these potentially may need to touch at least
some places where the identifier is used and I think all of them need
information that is not AFAIK currently returned from scan.l which means
passing that information along (which may change stuff along the way).

> > still has problems when quotes
> >are used inconsistently
> >
> The main issue, as far as I'm concerned, is not with PG apps that need
> to be ported to the new scheme. I don't have any qualm with never
> deprecating the lowercase folding. This, of course, puts a burden on
> utilities that work as infrastructure to always quote or always
> not-quote (depending on exact semantics), but that, I believe, is solveable.
>
> My problem is with applications written for other, more standard
> complient, databases, and with porting these into PG. As such, if the
> app uses inconsistent quoting, it today relies on uppercase folding, and
> will not have any problem.

That sounds like a plus for having the option for full uppercase folding.
I have no problems with that (I wouldn't have even looked at initdb if I
didn't want to give an option for uppercase folding) but I'm not convinced
it actually is a plus for the transitional setting. An app written for
full uppercase should work in said option without needing the transitional
setting and in fact the transitional setting might do the wrong thing for
said application. The only place I can see transitional being useful is
for upgrading and testing our own stuff (make the server work, make
pg_dump work, etc) and for applications moving from supporting only the
lowercase to supporting both or only upper. For the former, it doesn't
need to be a truly supported feature if it's going in in a single version,
and for the latter, I think as many of the wierd change and such issues as
possible are important and need to be considered if only for documentation
purposes.

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:
>
> Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
> ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
> concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
> need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
> MSSQL all have nice setup programs.

"nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have used Oracle's installer
to install a client and was not amused by it need hundreds of megabtyes
to do a client install.

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 11:45:28AM -0400, Robert Treat wrote:

> lower will now simply be folder upper. the only people who will have a
> problem are those who quote on one end but not the other, which is bad
> practice anyways... so i would say if your serious about it, make the
> patch as GUC "case_folding" for upper or lower and get a taste for what
> breaks inside the db.

If it were that easy, it wouldn't matter, right? That is, if you had
a system which was either consistently quoted or consistently
unquoted, then you'd never run into the problem of the upper-or-lower
question.

It's precisely _because_ systems often have been maintained by
various cranks for 20 years that it's a problem. One guy thinks
quoting is stupid. Another thinks that if you don't quote, you're
asking for trouble, A third has been rigourous in following the
quoting convention he learned in his last job. The ship date is
three weeks away, and there are 802 "P1" bugs filed. What chance do
you think there is that someone is going to scrub all the checkins of
quotes (or apply them carefully)? This is _exactly_ why standards
compliance for this stuff matters, and why backward comaptibility is
also a top priority.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan | ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca

I think that when considering install, it is very
important, if not critical, that we all understand who
is doing the install. Certainly if it is a person
much like us, meaning people on the
hackers/development list, we can all handle more terse
installs. Personally, I like the freedom of choices,
and not having a result of hundreds of megs that I
know are not required.

On the other hand, we are really a minority. The
masses certainly like simple installs, regardless of
just how many megs are used, needed or not. If the
masses really cared, then Microsoft would be in
trouble. But, as we can see in the market place, they
don't. In fact, most people think more is better.
Somehow they think 2 CDROMs is better than 1 CDROM.

So, if it takes an extra 200 meg to make a glitsy
install with little videos expounding on how great
Postgresql is, then for that user, it will make all of
the difference. We need to remember who the audience
is. We cannot gain mass market share otherwise.

My 2 cents, won't buy coffee,
Jordan Henderson
--- Bruno Wolff III <bruno(at)wolff(dot)to> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
> pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:
> >
> > Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions
> that address this are
> > ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the
> functionality is the primary
> > concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is
> VERY important. You guys
> > need to remember, people are coming from a world
> where MySQL, Oracle, and
> > MSSQL all have nice setup programs.
>
> "nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have
> used Oracle's installer
> to install a client and was not amused by it need
> hundreds of megabtyes
> to do a client install.
>
> ---------------------------(end of
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend

Bruno Wolff III wrote:

>On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
> pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:
>
>
>>Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
>>ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
>>concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
>>need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
>>MSSQL all have nice setup programs.
>>
>>
>
>"nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have used Oracle's installer
>to install a client and was not amused by it need hundreds of megabtyes
>to do a client install.
>
>
>
I second that. I have not found *anybody* who has used Oracle's
installer to install the actual database server on Linux or Solaris who
has described their installation proceedure as either "nice" or "easy."
In fact even reading the installation isntructions is enough to give you
second thoughts.... MS SQL does have a nice installer, however, as do
most binary open source products for Windows. I am completely confident
that PostgreSQL for Windows, when it arrives, will have a nice GUI-based
installer.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

On Saturday 24 April 2004 09:21, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> >Oh well... let's see if we can find a way to support both...
>
> You are welcome to join the other leg of this thread, then. That one is
> not CCed to advocacy, as it is 100% technical.
>

I'm already there...

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Stephan Szabo wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> > Stephan Szabo wrote:
>
> > > Things like "don't worry about the catalog
> > >entries" don't fly when your standard functions are defined and
> > >looked up there.
> > >
> > >
> > Answer above.
>
> Okay, under that world view (as opposed to on the fly), I think the only
> issues come in from shared catalogs, most importantly user names. This is

In fact the above is incomplete. You also need to be able to do the right
thing when creating a database with a different setting than its template
database. I'm not really sure how to define "right thing" however if
things have been added to the template db.

Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
> pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:
>
>>Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
>>ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
>>concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
>>need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
>>MSSQL all have nice setup programs.
>
>
> "nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have used Oracle's installer
> to install a client and was not amused by it need hundreds of megabtyes
> to do a client install.

I have to agree, I've installed DB2, Sybase, Oracle, Informix,
BerkeleyDB, mySQL, postgreSQL and others.

IIRC, I believe postgreSQL was the shortest from download to running
system (when compiling the OS ones from scratch) and seemed to do the
most thorough testing of itself.

Oracle doesn't seem to give you the option to not install the hundreds
of megs of documentation on the Nth machine where you just needed the
damn client lib - less of an issue now than in the smaller
disk/partition days.

But I think there is room to go further, I don't see any reason why that
default install can't include example DBs, sample maintenance scripts,
etc. One nice thing to have would be a sample DB with the scripts
necessary to spin up a test/demo DB with a size of X megs. Whenever I
started with a new DB system, I wished I didn't have to ramp up on a
bunch of topics before I was able to build a set of scripts to generate
and populate a sizable testing db. There is a big psychological factor
if you can install something, type one command and have a db with
250,000 records to start playing with.

Rob wrote:
> But I think there is room to go further, I don't see any reason why
> that default install can't include example DBs,

One reason is that a useful example database would likely have a
download footprint of 10 MB or more. Having this in the default
download would not be appreciated by many people. Of course having
some example database available at all would be a good idea, but then
as a separate download.

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> > But I think there is room to go further, I don't see any reason why
> > that default install can't include example DBs,
>
> One reason is that a useful example database would likely have a
> download footprint of 10 MB or more. Having this in the default
> download would not be appreciated by many people. Of course having
> some example database available at all would be a good idea, but then
> as a separate download.

Here is a little psql script I wrote to populate a table with random
data.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>
>>Rob wrote:
>>
>>>But I think there is room to go further, I don't see any reason why
>>>that default install can't include example DBs,
>>
>>One reason is that a useful example database would likely have a
>>download footprint of 10 MB or more. Having this in the default
>>download would not be appreciated by many people. Of course having
>>some example database available at all would be a good idea, but then
>>as a separate download.
>
>
> Here is a little psql script I wrote to populate a table with random
> data.
[snip]

Right, I have done the same in the past using random character data (it
even had random lengths of strings in the different fields) and in other
cases random dictionary words. I was thinking something with more
structure, like an customer/product/invoice db with random records that
link up to each other properly.

I will work on something but am wondering if there are any freely
available schemas around (for any system, I know Sybase has a book
publishing one that they use in their example queries and is provided
with their install, "pubs2" I believe) that might be good for use in a
more extended sample db.

Are there any platforms (outside of MS Windows) that don't include a
word list or dictionary these days?

Shachar,

> Now, I'm intending to do the best I can on my end. This does have a
> pretty heavy cost. It means that the OLE DB driver will parse in details
> each query, and perform replacements on the query text. This is bug
> prone, difficult, hurts performance, and just plain wrong from a
> software design perspective. The current drift of wind, however, means
> that the PostgreSQL steering commite seems to prefer having a lesser
> quality driver to seeing ugly uppercase.

Hey, now wait a minute. As far as I can tell, you've heard only from Tom
Lane on the steering committee (I may have missed some, though, I've been
sick) Unless the 5 of us take a vote, Tom Lane speaks for Tom Lane, not for
Core. Also, usually this list or Patches determines by consensus what gets
in; the Core only gets involved in very unusual cases.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

Josh Berkus wrote:

>Shachar,
>
>
>
>>Now, I'm intending to do the best I can on my end. This does have a
>>pretty heavy cost. It means that the OLE DB driver will parse in details
>>each query, and perform replacements on the query text. This is bug
>>prone, difficult, hurts performance, and just plain wrong from a
>>software design perspective. The current drift of wind, however, means
>>that the PostgreSQL steering commite seems to prefer having a lesser
>>quality driver to seeing ugly uppercase.
>>
>>
>
>Hey, now wait a minute. As far as I can tell, you've heard only from Tom
>Lane on the steering committee (I may have missed some, though, I've been
>sick)
>
Exactly. Of the people I heard from, the wind was against.

> Unless the 5 of us take a vote, Tom Lane speaks for Tom Lane, not for
>Core. Also, usually this list or Patches determines by consensus what gets
>in; the Core only gets involved in very unusual cases.
>
>
That's why we are holding an open thread on the "how" in "hackers". I'm
assuming that once the "how" is sufficiently resolved, and the
implications understood, everyone can make a better decision on the "do
we at all".

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/

I'm certain you guys could do a far better installer than the one Oracle
has, which is very, very fragile. There's all kinds of wonkiness to try
and get it to work on a non-supported linux distro (gentoo in my case),
and from talking to people who've dealt with it on redhat it's no
better.

Also, if possible, I think an installer that plays nice with package
management systems would be important. Many users want to use their OS's
package system to handle install and upgrade rather than some other
installer.

On Sat, Apr 24, 2004 at 12:10:01PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 16:36:57 -0400,
> pgsql(at)mohawksoft(dot)com wrote:
> >
> > Ease of use is VERY important, but few suggestions that address this are
> > ever really accepted. Yes, focusing on the functionality is the primary
> > concern, but "how" you set it up and deploy it is VERY important. You guys
> > need to remember, people are coming from a world where MySQL, Oracle, and
> > MSSQL all have nice setup programs.
>
> "nice" must be in the eye of the beholder. I have used Oracle's installer
> to install a client and was not amused by it need hundreds of megabtyes
> to do a client install.
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
>

--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant jim(at)nasby(dot)net
Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"

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Hash: SHA1

> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?"  I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.

Dear Bruce,

Taking the example of pgAdmin III, which reached nearly one million hits in
December (http://www.pgadmin.org/stats/webalizer), nothing seems impossible
for PostgreSQL.

Why not create an all-in-one bundle offering PostgreSQL, Apache, Php and
PhpPgAdmin for Win32 and ... mass-release it.

There is no need to create a complete installer. There could be a single
installer executing other installers (like it is sometimes the case in the
Win32 world). So that installers remain different.

A single web page like "http://win.postgresql.org" in 40 languages is enough
to mass-release PostgreSQL.

With an installer and a single web page, PostgreSQL Win32 could quickly reach
one million downloads every month.

There is no need to look for complicated strategies. Every month, there can be
10% more downloads. In the end, people will even forget the name of MySQL.

Cheers,
Jean-Michel
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Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
[ PGP not available, raw data follows ]
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> > My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> > anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> Dear Bruce,
>
> Taking the example of pgAdmin III, which reached nearly one million hits in
> December (http://www.pgadmin.org/stats/webalizer), nothing seems impossible
> for PostgreSQL.
>
> Why not create an all-in-one bundle offering PostgreSQL, Apache, Php and
> PhpPgAdmin for Win32 and ... mass-release it.
>
> There is no need to create a complete installer. There could be a single
> installer executing other installers (like it is sometimes the case in the
> Win32 world). So that installers remain different.
>
> A single web page like "http://win.postgresql.org" in 40 languages is enough
> to mass-release PostgreSQL.
>
> With an installer and a single web page, PostgreSQL Win32 could quickly reach
> one million downloads every month.
>
> There is no need to look for complicated strategies. Every month, there can be
> 10% more downloads. In the end, people will even forget the name of MySQL.

That seems like a good idea.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Bruce asked an excellent question:

> My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.

After watching the traffic on this, the biggest MySQL lesson has gone
largely unmentioned: that a well-funded, well-marketed, focused commercial
entity clearly associated with the project can do wonders to overcome
feature and technical shortcomings.

At some point (probably there now), I think the lack of a "Postgres, Inc."
is going to hinder adoption. Companies want to 'buy' from vendors that look
like real, viable companies, and provide them products with support,
training, features, and direction. With MySQL, you get one stop shopping.
With Postgres, you've got to find and assemble the parts yourself. Most
CIOs stop there, and start waiting for MySQL to get better before switching
from Oracle.

The other issue is marketing: in mature software markets, the best
marketing (not the best technology) often wins. Without a sizeable
marketing budget earmarked for Postgres, MySQL could be 60% as good and
still win, unfortunately.

For those that believe that the Linux kernel is a success model, don't
forget that Red Hat had a lot to do with putting Linux on the map. And IBM.

For those that look to Apache: Apache never had a well-established
incumbent (Oracle), an a well-funded upstart competitor (MySQL). Rob
McCool's NCSA httpd (and later, Apache) were good enough and developed
rapidly enough that they prevented any other HTTP server projects from
getting critical mass.

The corollary to Bruce's question: where do *you* see the Postgres project
in 3 years? Market share? Key features? Niche?

Related: does MySQL stumble somehow, or do they keep gaining share?

-andy

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 04:41:35PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
> [ PGP not available, raw data follows ]
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > > My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?"  I don't know there is
> > > anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
> >
> > Dear Bruce,
> >
> > Taking the example of pgAdmin III, which reached nearly one million hits in
> > December (http://www.pgadmin.org/stats/webalizer), nothing seems impossible
> > for PostgreSQL.
> >
> > Why not create an all-in-one bundle offering PostgreSQL, Apache, Php and
> > PhpPgAdmin for Win32 and ... mass-release it.
> >
> > There is no need to create a complete installer. There could be a single
> > installer executing other installers (like it is sometimes the case in the
> > Win32 world). So that installers remain different.
> >
> > A single web page like "http://win.postgresql.org" in 40 languages is enough
> > to mass-release PostgreSQL.
> >
> > With an installer and a single web page, PostgreSQL Win32 could quickly reach
> > one million downloads every month.
> >
> > There is no need to look for complicated strategies. Every month, there can be
> > 10% more downloads. In the end, people will even forget the name of MySQL.
>
> That seems like a good idea.

Agree. The page should be describe basic PostgreSQL features and
step-by-step introduction from download to a first user's "SELECT ...
FROM".

Do you expect translate PostgreSQL-win installer to foreign languages?

Karel

--
Karel Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/

Le mardi 27 Avril 2004 09:59, Karel Zak a écrit :
>  Agree. The  page  should  be  describe basic  PostgreSQL  features  and
>  step-by-step introduction from  download to a first  user's "SELECT ...
>  FROM".

Dear Karel and Bruce,

A step-by-step introduction is interesting, to the extent that the
http://win32.postgresql.org home page remains minimal,
so that translators do not need to upgrade their translation from time to
time. At first, five paragraphs are enough:

- Presentation of PostgreSQL: "PostgreSQL is the most advanced database in the
world, offering a complete solution suited for every need, etc...".

- Step by step installation procedure (with screenshots). The screenshots may
remain in English.

- Links to the documentation and the mailing lists.

- Links to the PostgreSQL NLS project (Peter).

- Legal disclaimer.

Having a translation is important because people running Windows mostly seek
information in their language on seach engines.

Then, like in the pgAdmin III project, you can sit on a chair and monitor
downloads. IMHO, the number of downloads can quickly rise to one million a
month.

>  Do you expect translate PostgreSQL-win installer to foreign languages?

Probably not, this is too much work. But this can come in a second stage.

Because PostgreSQL is such a wonderfull project, there is no need to build
complex marketing strategies. A single web page and a complete installer is
enough to reach impressive numbers.

Of course, the most difficult part is the Win32 installer.

Cheers,
Jean-Michel Pouré

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 10:43:36AM +0200, Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
> >  Do you expect translate PostgreSQL-win installer to foreign languages?
>
> Probably not, this is too much work. But this can come in a second stage.

I don't think it's a lot of work. The PostgreSQL translators spent
time with translation of things like Xlog messages or the other
"deep-in-backend" stuff so I think they will happy with someting
more visible and usable like PostgreSQL installer ;-)

The important is if the installer code support some way how user can
selects a language.

Karel

--
Karel Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/

I've been sort-of reading this thread off and on, so this may
contain duplicate suggestions.

I was researching an article I wrote about a comparison between
Postgres and MySQL recently (If you want, you can read the article
at http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/). I noticed some clear
differences between the mysql.com website and the Postgres website.

1) Since MySQL AB supports and trains for MySQL, there's loads of
training information available on their website. On the other
hand, I had a hard time finding training information for Postgres
in general. Same goes for support. It's easier to find, but it's
still somewhat convoluted, IMO.

2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions. I know
it's not a perfect list, but it'd be nice to know when full blown
replication will be included in PostgreSQL as an example.
On those same lines, there doesn't seem to be anything about the
improvements in the minor versions. It seems that in every
release (i.e. 7.2,7.3,7.4) there are pretty significant changes,
but finding a place that outlines these changes is somewhat
difficult.
While being somewhat nit-picky on this, it'd also be helpful if
someone wasn't completely database literate could understand some
of the changes. Who needs transactions, anyways? :)

3) There's the issues of 'advanced database features' in general.
Many MySQL applications perform much of their logic in the
application level, instead of the database level. They do this
because there aren't things like triggers or stored procedures
in MySQL. As the saying goes, 'if mohammad won't go to the
mountain, bring the mountian to mohammad'. Why not do some
simple explainations as to why these things are good, and what
they do, and how to use them in real context?

4) As other peole have noted, there's no windows build readily
available for Postgres. There may be, but it's difficult to
find. If someone's used to running, say, Oracle, and all they
have is a windows machine to test something out on, MySQL has
compiled binaries ready to go.

5) I believe that this was noted as well somewhere along the line -
the other tools, like pgadmin III aren't readily available
either. They're excellent tools, and they should be quick to
find on the postgres website.

6) Bug tracking. I haven't really looked into how MySQL handles
this, but when learning about Postgres, I discovered that the
whole development model seemed kind of 'closed', and people on
the mailing lists would find bugs repeatedly. Something like
Bugzilla would be very helpful in this respect. I've been kind
of out of the loop for the past 6 months in this area, so it may
have changed since then.

7) The two Postgres books are available online for anyone to read
and download. They're there, but, to me, you have to notice them
on the sidebar to go to them. They're extremely helpful, and
they should be pointed out more.

Most of these suggestions aren't really anything to do with the
database itself. It's simply a re-organization of some of the
information that's already available. As others have mentioned,
'it's about the PR'.

Just my $.02 worth.

Tim

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Tim Conrad wrote:

> 1) Since MySQL AB supports and trains for MySQL, there's loads of
> training information available on their website. On the other
> hand, I had a hard time finding training information for Postgres
> in general. Same goes for support. It's easier to find, but it's
> still somewhat convoluted, IMO.

Just a thought on this ... would it be possible to add two links to the
existing site:

Commercial Support
Commercial Hosting

that point directly to the lists we already have? So that ppl don't have
to go digging for that info?

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

Hi!

Tim Conrad wrote:
> I was researching an article I wrote about a comparison between
> Postgres and MySQL recently (If you want, you can read the article
> at http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/). I noticed some clear
> differences between the mysql.com website and the Postgres website.

Sorry, couldn't resist: may I suggest doing the research *before*
writing an article, not *after*?

My favourite part of it is:
--------
MySQL uses traditional row-level locking. PostgreSQL uses something
called Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) by default. MVCC is a
little different from row-level locking in that transactions on the
database are performed on a snapshot of the data and then serialized.
New versions of PostgreSQL support standard row-level locking as an
option, but MVCC is the preferred method.
--------

> 2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
> When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
> Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
> nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions. I know
> it's not a perfect list, but it'd be nice to know when full blown
> replication will be included in PostgreSQL as an example.

MySQL's roadmap is complete bullshit. Subselects were first promised in
4.0, which was "not that far away" [1] back in 1998! Well, they are in
4.1, which is still alpha in 2004.

Of course, some gullible people actually believe this and compare [2]
the existing and working implementations with vaporware (MySQL 5.1,
anyone?).

> On those same lines, there doesn't seem to be anything about the
> improvements in the minor versions. It seems that in every
> release (i.e. 7.2,7.3,7.4) there are pretty significant changes,
> but finding a place that outlines these changes is somewhat
> difficult.

Have you tried looking in the release notes [3]?

[1] http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/194/1998/8/0/1061364/
[2] http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/1763?supportItem=1
[3] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/release.html

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Tim Conrad wrote:

> 2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
> When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
> Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
> nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions.

Not possible for us, since we have no "upper management" that dictates
what features get added, for when ...

> I know
> it's not a perfect list, but it'd be nice to know when full blown
> replication will be included in PostgreSQL as an example.

Never, since there is no such thing as a 'full blown replication', since
there is no *one* way to do replication ...

> 3) There's the issues of 'advanced database features' in general.
> Many MySQL applications perform much of their logic in the
> application level, instead of the database level. They do this
> because there aren't things like triggers or stored procedures
> in MySQL. As the saying goes, 'if mohammad won't go to the
> mountain, bring the mountian to mohammad'. Why not do some
> simple explainations as to why these things are good, and what
> they do, and how to use them in real context?

Just a matter of someone writing and submitting it ... how are your
writing skills? :)

> 4) As other peole have noted, there's no windows build readily
> available for Postgres. There may be, but it's difficult to
> find. If someone's used to running, say, Oracle, and all they
> have is a windows machine to test something out on, MySQL has
> compiled binaries ready to go.

there is no native windows currently available, but its being worked on
for 7.5 ... after which, a pre-compiled binary becomes automatic ...

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 07:55:08PM +0400, Alexey Borzov wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Tim Conrad wrote:
> >I was researching an article I wrote about a comparison between
> >Postgres and MySQL recently (If you want, you can read the article
> >at http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/). I noticed some clear
> >differences between the mysql.com website and the Postgres website.
>
> Sorry, couldn't resist: may I suggest doing the research *before*
> writing an article, not *after*?
>
> My favourite part of it is:
> --------
> MySQL uses traditional row-level locking. PostgreSQL uses something
> called Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) by default. MVCC is a
> little different from row-level locking in that transactions on the
> database are performed on a snapshot of the data and then serialized.
> New versions of PostgreSQL support standard row-level locking as an
> option, but MVCC is the preferred method.
> --------
Nice that you point out that incorrectly stated something. Even
nicer that you don't tell me what the correct answer would be.
Unfortunanatly, that's the best I could come up with with doing
research with the documentation I could find on the subject. MVCC
does a lot more than can be easily contained in a sentance.

>
> >2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
> > When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
> > Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
> > nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions. I know
> > it's not a perfect list, but it'd be nice to know when full blown
> > replication will be included in PostgreSQL as an example.
>
> MySQL's roadmap is complete bullshit. Subselects were first promised in
> 4.0, which was "not that far away" [1] back in 1998! Well, they are in
> 4.1, which is still alpha in 2004.

I realize this. I also realize that having a nicely defined roadmap would
give Postgres a hands up in this category.

>
> Of course, some gullible people actually believe this and compare [2]
> the existing and working implementations with vaporware (MySQL 5.1,
> anyone?).
>
> > On those same lines, there doesn't seem to be anything about the
> > improvements in the minor versions. It seems that in every
> > release (i.e. 7.2,7.3,7.4) there are pretty significant changes,
> > but finding a place that outlines these changes is somewhat
> > difficult.
>
> Have you tried looking in the release notes [3]?
>
>
> [1] http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/194/1998/8/0/1061364/
> [2] http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/1763?supportItem=1
> [3] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/release.html

I guess I'm an ignorant fool and I don't comprehend many of the
items under the release note. I'm also looking for something I can
hand my boss and say ' this is why we should use postgres instead of
oracle'.

Tim

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 12:58:59PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Tim Conrad wrote:
>
> > 2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
> > When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
> > Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
> > nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions.
>
> Not possible for us, since we have no "upper management" that dictates
> what features get added, for when ...

Not entirely true. I've read enough on the lists to see Bruce or
others saying 'x feature isn't expected until version y.z'. Heck, to
me, something that says 'we're hoping for feature x in version y.z',
but it's not an exact science. See the MySQL releases as an example
:)

>
> > I know
> > it's not a perfect list, but it'd be nice to know when full blown
> > replication will be included in PostgreSQL as an example.
>
> Never, since there is no such thing as a 'full blown replication', since
> there is no *one* way to do replication ...

It was puretly there for example purposes...
>
> > 3) There's the issues of 'advanced database features' in general.
> > Many MySQL applications perform much of their logic in the
> > application level, instead of the database level. They do this
> > because there aren't things like triggers or stored procedures
> > in MySQL. As the saying goes, 'if mohammad won't go to the
> > mountain, bring the mountian to mohammad'. Why not do some
> > simple explainations as to why these things are good, and what
> > they do, and how to use them in real context?
>
> Just a matter of someone writing and submitting it ... how are your
> writing skills? :)
>
> > 4) As other peole have noted, there's no windows build readily
> > available for Postgres. There may be, but it's difficult to
> > find. If someone's used to running, say, Oracle, and all they
> > have is a windows machine to test something out on, MySQL has
> > compiled binaries ready to go.
>
> there is no native windows currently available, but its being worked on
> for 7.5 ... after which, a pre-compiled binary becomes automatic ...
>
>
> ----
> Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
> Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

Tim Conrad wrote:
> > Of course, some gullible people actually believe this and compare [2]
> > the existing and working implementations with vaporware (MySQL 5.1,
> > anyone?).
> >
> > > On those same lines, there doesn't seem to be anything about the
> > > improvements in the minor versions. It seems that in every
> > > release (i.e. 7.2,7.3,7.4) there are pretty significant changes,
> > > but finding a place that outlines these changes is somewhat
> > > difficult.
> >
> > Have you tried looking in the release notes [3]?
> >
> >
> > [1] http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/194/1998/8/0/1061364/
> > [2] http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/1763?supportItem=1
> > [3] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/interactive/release.html
>
> I guess I'm an ignorant fool and I don't comprehend many of the
> items under the release note. I'm also looking for something I can
> hand my boss and say ' this is why we should use postgres instead of
> oracle'.

I think the summary of each release at the top would be OK for that.

Actually, your biggest problem is that we don't have a big motivation to
_sell_ PostgreSQL to anyone. We are more driven toward solving problems
and designing superior software. If it looks like we don't have a
polished sales image, that's because we don't stive for that. However,
we have had a large number of volunteers over the past few months focus
in this area and I hope there will be visible results shortly.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 359-1001
+ If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road
+ Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Tim Conrad wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 12:58:59PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Tim Conrad wrote:
> >
> > > 2) There doesn't seem to be a clear roadmap on Postgres features.
> > > When certian things are expected. There's the TODO list that
> > > Bruce maintains, but it only outlines 'near' fixes. MySQL has a
> > > nice listing of what to expect in certian future versions.
> >
> > Not possible for us, since we have no "upper management" that dictates
> > what features get added, for when ...
>
> Not entirely true. I've read enough on the lists to see Bruce or
> others saying 'x feature isn't expected until version y.z'. Heck, to
> me, something that says 'we're hoping for feature x in version y.z',
> but it's not an exact science. See the MySQL releases as an example
> :)

Ah, then in that case, look at the TODO list, pull out all items that have
a name beside them, and for those, they aren't expected until the next
version .. :)

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

> > Not entirely true. I've read enough on the lists to see Bruce or
> > others saying 'x feature isn't expected until version y.z'. Heck, to
> > me, something that says 'we're hoping for feature x in version y.z',
> > but it's not an exact science. See the MySQL releases as an example
> > :)
>
> Ah, then in that case, look at the TODO list, pull out all items that have
> a name beside them, and for those, they aren't expected until the next
> version .. :)

But the list is loooonng...and my brain is weeeaaaakkk. :)

Seriously, though. I was looking through the list yesterday trying
to figure out something, and it was kind of hard to do.But, more to
my point, this stuff is in the MySQL manual, making it easy to find.
(Yes. I know what MySQL includes kind of blows, but, it's better
than nothing)

Tim

Tim,

Ok, first off, taking this thread off Hackers where it's not necessary.

> Seriously, though. I was looking through the list yesterday trying
> to figure out something, and it was kind of hard to do.But, more to
> my point, this stuff is in the MySQL manual, making it easy to find.
> (Yes. I know what MySQL includes kind of blows, but, it's better
> than nothing)

Well, our issue is that we have a significant phobia of announcing features
that we can't deliver. A lot of us are still embarassed over the
7.4+Windows thing. And many, many other features got as far as a first-round
patch and then died for a variety of reasons, or have had their development
drag on for 3 years (2PC comes to mind).

I guess there's a perception that we are "above" the marketeering of MySQL and
Microsoft, where features are promised as much as 6 years before they appear,
or are heavily publicized while still in alpha. So the most you'd be likely
to get the community to commit to is maintaining a list of easy-to-read
"Major Features in Development".

Which wouldn't be a bad idea, at that. But not in the Docs ;-)

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

Tim, Folks:
> I guess there's a perception that we are "above" the marketeering of MySQL
> and Microsoft, where features are promised as much as 6 years before they
> appear, or are heavily publicized while still in alpha. So the most you'd
> be likely to get the community to commit to is maintaining a list of
> easy-to-read "Major Features in Development".

Actually, I really like this idea. It could go like:

Feature Lead Status
Improved Memory Use Jan Wieck Complete, Committed for 7.5
HA M-S Replication Jan Wieck Alpha testing
PITR Simon Riggs Early Development
Tablespaces Gavin Sherry Late Development
Integrated pg_autovacuum Matthew O'Con. Planning
Server Clustering None Developer Needed
etc.

As well as giving the press something to look at, this would give programmers
and corporate sponsors an idea of where their time/money would be of use.
And it could put to bed the myth that we're not constantly improving.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 10:39:52AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Tim, Folks:
> > I guess there's a perception that we are "above" the marketeering of MySQL
> > and Microsoft, where features are promised as much as 6 years before they
> > appear, or are heavily publicized while still in alpha. So the most you'd
> > be likely to get the community to commit to is maintaining a list of
> > easy-to-read "Major Features in Development".
>
> Actually, I really like this idea. It could go like:
>
> Feature Lead Status
> Improved Memory Use Jan Wieck Complete, Committed for 7.5
> HA M-S Replication Jan Wieck Alpha testing
> PITR Simon Riggs Early Development
> Tablespaces Gavin Sherry Late Development
> Integrated pg_autovacuum Matthew O'Con. Planning
> Server Clustering None Developer Needed
> etc.
>
> As well as giving the press something to look at, this would give programmers
> and corporate sponsors an idea of where their time/money would be of use.
> And it could put to bed the myth that we're not constantly improving.

This suggestion would be good. Something that's not super-detailed
and not super-technical. Also stuff that's on the 'todo' list that
is certianly long-range goals as well - just so people are aware
that it's something that the 'group' is aware of as well as a need.

Tim

Hi!

Tim Conrad wrote:
>>My favourite part of it is:
>>--------
>>MySQL uses traditional row-level locking. PostgreSQL uses something
>>called Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) by default. MVCC is a
>>little different from row-level locking in that transactions on the
>>database are performed on a snapshot of the data and then serialized.
>>New versions of PostgreSQL support standard row-level locking as an
>>option, but MVCC is the preferred method.
>>--------
>
> Nice that you point out that incorrectly stated something. Even
> nicer that you don't tell me what the correct answer would be.
> Unfortunanatly, that's the best I could come up with with doing
> research with the documentation I could find on the subject. MVCC
> does a lot more than can be easily contained in a sentance.

The problem is that in MySQL
1) MyISAM does table-level locking;
2) BDB does row-level locking;
3) InnoDB does MVCC (mostly) like PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL does support row-level locking (SELECT ... FOR UPDATE), table-level
locking (LOCK TABLE ...), though this does not *replace* MVCC, as one may
understand from the quotation.

>>MySQL's roadmap is complete bullshit. Subselects were first promised in
>>4.0, which was "not that far away" [1] back in 1998! Well, they are in
>>4.1, which is still alpha in 2004.
>
> I realize this. I also realize that having a nicely defined roadmap would
> give Postgres a hands up in this category.

A hands up in *what* category? In bragging?

Should PostgreSQL developers write something along the lines of "PostgreSQL 9i
(available Really Soon Now) will also be able to make coffee"?

Well, as you know about coffee now, why don't you add "make coffee" to your
comparison table, with empty space in MySQL's and commercial DBMSs' columns and
"in 9i" in PostgreSQL's one?

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 21:31:33 -0400,
Andrew Payne <andy(at)payne(dot)org> wrote:
>
> At some point (probably there now), I think the lack of a "Postgres, Inc."
> is going to hinder adoption. Companies want to 'buy' from vendors that look
> like real, viable companies, and provide them products with support,
> training, features, and direction. With MySQL, you get one stop shopping.
> With Postgres, you've got to find and assemble the parts yourself. Most
> CIOs stop there, and start waiting for MySQL to get better before switching
> from Oracle.

I would expect that technical people (which would be DBAs and application
developers) should be doing this research and reporting the results to the CIO.

> The other issue is marketing: in mature software markets, the best
> marketing (not the best technology) often wins. Without a sizeable
> marketing budget earmarked for Postgres, MySQL could be 60% as good and
> still win, unfortunately.

It is not clear that Postgres needs to "win". It needs to have enough people
interested in it in order to continue to significant development. It doesn't
need to have a majority of the market share in order to do this. I suspect
that get a larger market share amoungst some categories of users will
hurt development by requiring more support than they contribute back to
the project.

> For those that look to Apache: Apache never had a well-established
> incumbent (Oracle), an a well-funded upstart competitor (MySQL). Rob
> McCool's NCSA httpd (and later, Apache) were good enough and developed
> rapidly enough that they prevented any other HTTP server projects from
> getting critical mass.

Perhaps for a while. There are open source web servers now. A derivative
of AOLserver is used by openACS.

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 12:57:46PM -0400, Tim Conrad wrote:

> Seriously, though. I was looking through the list yesterday trying
> to figure out something, and it was kind of hard to do.But, more to
> my point, this stuff is in the MySQL manual, making it easy to find.
> (Yes. I know what MySQL includes kind of blows, but, it's better
> than nothing)

You know, that's kind of the point of all things related to MySQL.
"It's better than nothing." PostgreSQL doesn't do things because "it's
better than nothing." My first patch here was rejected, not because it
didn't do anything useful (it did), but because "it didn't solve the
complete problem." I had to do a lot more work to get it accepted.
Similarly, people here don't want to showcase a list of things that will
be on the next release, because we _don't know_ what will be on the next
release. There are guesses, but guesses are not good enough.

(Same as how MySQL guesses the result of a modulo operation, and gets it
wrong. They don't care and you can read that on the manual. In
Postgres, this is a bug.)

In PostgreSQL there are no guesses. There are certainties. And I think
this it how it should be for a database server ;-)

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"No hay cielo posible sin hundir nuestras raíces
en la profundidad de la tierra" (Malucha Pinto)

Jim C. Nasby wrote:

>Maybe also a more generic section about how PGSQL is different from
>other databases. Maybe I'm just dense, but it took me a long time to
>figure out the whole lack of stored procedures thing (yes, PGSQL
>obviously has the functionality, but many experienced DBAs won't
>associate functions with stored procs). Pointing out the documentation
>on MVCC and how it changes how you want to use the database would be
>good, as would links to documentation on what postgresql.conf settings
>you want to change out of the box.
>
>
>
I think this is a good idea. And you seem to be suggesting that it
includes information on differences in nomenclature as well.

>On the other topics...
>I think the biggest service PGSQL could provide to the open source
>community is a resource that teaches people with no database experience
>the fundamentals of databases. If people had an understanding of what a
>RDBMS should be capable of and how it should be used, they wouldn't pick
>MySQL.
>
>

I think that this is incredibly important. Many many developers choose
MySQL because MySQL really does make the effort in this regard. This
strategy has helped both MySQL and Red Hat become the commercial
successes they are today.

>Having a windows port is critical for 'student mindshare'. If PGSQL can't
>play on windows, professors can't use it. Likewise, installation on OS X
>should be made as easy as possible.
>
>
PostgreSQL *can* play on Windows (via Cygwin) and I am not sure that
this is so important to student mindshare. Howener, it is important for
another reason: a windows port (even one labled "for development use
only") would go a LONG way towards recruiting new faces into our
community, as it would lower the barrier to entry for using the database
(yes, the Cygwin installer because of the ipc stuff is a reasonable
barrier to entry).

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Andrew Payne wrote:

>
> Bruce asked an excellent question:
>
> > My question is, "What can we learn from MySQL?" I don't know there is
> > anything, but I think it makes sense to ask the question.
>
> After watching the traffic on this, the biggest MySQL lesson has gone
> largely unmentioned: that a well-funded, well-marketed, focused commercial
> entity clearly associated with the project can do wonders to overcome
> feature and technical shortcomings.
>
> At some point (probably there now), I think the lack of a "Postgres, Inc."
> is going to hinder adoption. Companies want to 'buy' from vendors that look
> like real, viable companies, and provide them products with support,
> training, features, and direction. With MySQL, you get one stop shopping.
> With Postgres, you've got to find and assemble the parts yourself. Most
> CIOs stop there, and start waiting for MySQL to get better before switching
> from Oracle.

I'm gonna disagree here. I think that not having a postgresql inc to go
to means that by the time postgresql becomes ubiquitous, it will be like
apache. no company behind it, every company using it. I.e. we'll earn
our stripes one at a time by proving we're the better database for 95% of
all purposes, and anyone not using postgresql will be behind the power
curve and doing themselves no favor. like CIO's who call Open Source
"Shareware" and believe that .net provides for a more efficient
programming environment, people who poo poo postgresql will find
themselves behind the 8 ball in the long run. No need for a postgresql
inc to do that, just time, good code, and knowledgable DBAs choosing it
more and more often.