Re: foreign key locks, 2nd attempt

Excerpts from Greg Smith's message of jue feb 23 14:48:13 -0300 2012:
> On 02/23/2012 10:43 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > I completely understand that you don't want to review this latest
> > version of the patch; it's a lot of effort and I wouldn't inflict it on
> > anybody who hasn't not volunteered. However, it doesn't seem to me that
> > this is reason to boot the patch from the commitfest. I think the thing
> > to do would be to remove yourself from the reviewers column and set it
> > back to "needs review", so that other reviewers can pick it up.
>
> This feature made Robert's list of serious CF concerns, too, and the
> idea that majorly revised patches might be punted isn't a new one.

Well, this patch (or rather, a previous incarnation of it) got punted
from 9.1's fourth commitfest; I intended to have the new version in
9.2's first CF, but business reasons (which I will not discuss in
public) forced me otherwise. So here we are again -- as I said to Tom,
I don't intend to let go of this one easily, though of course I will
concede to whatever the community decides.

> Noah
> is certainly justified in saying you're off his community support list,
> after all the review work he's been doing for this CF.

Yeah, I can't blame him. I've been trying to focus most of my review
availability on his own patches precisely due to that, but it's very
clear to me that his effort is larger than mine.

> We here think it would be a shame for all of these other performance
> bits to be sorted but still have this one loose though, if it's possible
> to keep going on it. It's well known as something on Simon's peeve list
> for some time now. I was just reading someone else ranting about how
> this foreign key locking issue proves Postgres isn't "enterprise scale"
> yesterday, it was part of an article proving why DB2 is worth paying for
> I think. This change crosses over into the advocacy area due to that,
> albeit only for the people who have been burned by this already.

Yeah, Simon's been on this particular issue for quite some time -- which
is probably why the initial idea that kickstarted this patch was his.
Personally I've been in the "not enterprise strength" camp for a long
time, mostly unintentionally; you can see that by tracing how my major
patches close holes in that kind of area ("cluster loses indexes", "we
don't have subtransactions", "foreign key concurrency sucks" (--> SELECT
FOR SHARE), "manual vacuum is teh sux0r", and now this one about FKs
again).

--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
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