Re: Straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept

On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 07:18, Tom Lane wrote:
> I've been having a lot of fun here at the SIGMOD annual conference,
> attaching faces to names like Stonebraker, Hellerstein, Aoki,
> Seltzer (if these do not ring a bell, you ain't read enough Postgres
> source code lately). I felt I had to pass along this gem from Joe
> Hellerstein, right after he observed that he knew the PG sources
> quite well, and he'd noticed MySQL was a lot smaller:
>
> "Postgres is bloatware by design: it was built to house PhD theses."
>
> immediately followed by
>
> "The current maintainers [he's looking right at me while he says this]
> have done a great job of trimming the fat. I know that *my* thesis
> is gone entirely."

I hope it is removed in such a clean way that it can be put back _as an
installable module_ if needed.

Bloatware or not, one of the main advantages of PG is that it is
designed to be extensible.

<rant>

One thing I think we have stripped too much is time travel. I hope that
there will be possibility to put back hooks for the following:

1) logging dead tuples as they are removed,either to text file or
archive table/database depending on installed logging function)

2) have VACUUM delete only tuples dead before transaction N (I'd prefer
some timestamp, but that would need logging transaction times or moving
transaction iods to 64bits so that they can embed time)

3) some way to tell postgres to get data as it was at transaction N - it
would be a great way for recovering accidentally deleted data (I send
out my quite crappy python code for retrieving dead tuples from data
files 1-2 times a month :)

SELECT * FROM MYTABLE AS OF TRANSACTION(123456) would be great.

4) some sparse logging of transaction times, say log current trx nr
every 5 minutes, making 3) more usable.

</rant>

-------------------
Hannu, anxiousy wating for more stuff the alleged horses have to say ;)