Re: postgresql book - practical or something newer?

On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 15:54 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> <rant>
> One of the worst aspect of PG is the documentation, or the lack of it in
> terms of "traditional" house. The Manual is fine and all, but in most
> cases, what I find that it lacks is actually examples. Either examples
> to show what it a particular field/query means but also as a way to show
> exactly how a particular problem can be solved.

With respect, I have to disagree here. The strength of PG's
documentation is, in fact, one of the key reasons I switched my company
completely off a commercial RDBMS and onto PostgreSQL. In my opinion,
PostgreSQL has, hands-down, the best documentation of any FOSS package
I've used, and it's better than much commercial documentation too. The
development group seems to be be uncompromising in its dedication to
keeping the documentation up-to-date, accurate, and thorough.

You should see what some of these commercial vendors try to pass off as
documentation! It's awful.

I don't disagree with your point that it's not robust with examples of
"exactly how a particular problem can be solved". But I think there are
enough, and more importantly, I don't think problem-solving is an
important focus for a manual (that's why 3rd party books exist). The
manual needs to be *the* reference document so that end users don't need
to read source code in order to understand how the system works.
Example-oriented documentation has a tendency to skimp on the reference
material and leave big gaping holes, in my experience. I like the
reference focus of the existing PostgreSQL manual very much.

--
Jason Topaz
topaz(at)panix(dot)com