Re: Top five challenges

["Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com>]

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> 1. Easy Install
> 2. Simple, low-overhead replication
> 3. Upgrade-in-place
> 4. Administration & monitoring
> 5. Driver quality/maintenance

>> ... it's really nice the number of the above issues we've knocked out
>> since 2007.
> 
> yes... it would be interesting to know what are the 5 next challenges :)

I think we haven't finished these five yet! :)

> 1. Easy Install

Solved, I suppose. We've always had "yum install" and friends, and now 
we have the EDB 1-click installer. The only fly in the ointment is 
the recent crap Debian pulled (yes, what they did was correct, but 
it should have been handled much better). Hopefully that will be solved 
soon with some better (and better licensed) supporting software.
So this one is done.

> 2. Simple, low-overhead replication

Great progress here with hot standby which satisfies a great number 
of replication needs with very low overhead. I would not call it 
"simple" yet, but there are some tools out there that are attempting 
to fix this. Sometimes you need more than hot standby of course, and 
none of Bucardo, Slony, or Londiste are simple or low overhead. To be 
fair, however, I wonder how simple and low overhead some of the other 
RDBMSs solutions are. This one is mostly done.

> 3. Upgrade-in-place

Big success and big fail here. pg_upgrade goes a long, long way towards 
something better than pg_dump|psql, but it's not a true upgrade-in-place, 
where I can point my Postgres X+1 at my Postgres X data directory and 
have it all work. We need to catch up with Oracle on this. Halfway done.

> 4. Administration & monitoring

This is a pretty vague and wide-ranging topic, so it's hard to address. 
We do have a slew of administration GUIs, and a bunch of monitoring 
tools, but especially the latter need some work. Would be nice if these 
bullet points were broken down a little further with some actual 
specific complaints or ideas. Any chance of that, Josh?

> 5. Driver quality/maintenance

Also a little vague - which drivers? Certainly most of the major languages 
have decent drivers now. I think the Perl one is pretty good ;). PHP 
and Ruby are much improved in the last few years, and the most problematic 
one, Python, is getting better (and finally winnowing the choices as well).

The maintenance is probably still an issue. Certainly there is a very 
small number of people taking care of each driver, and no single company 
(e.g. EDB) stepping up to dedicate a group of people to the care of 
feeding of a driver.


- -- 
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/
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