Re: Google SoC--Idea Request

On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 11:05:18PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Jonah H. Harris" <jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > While the student could do some benchmarking on relatively new
> > hardware and make suggestions, I agree with Tom. Having to keep
> > support for older platforms doesn't leave much flexibility to change
> > the defaults.
>
> Another point here is that the defaults *are* reasonable for development
> and for small installations; the people who are complaining are the ones
> who expect to run terabyte databases without any tuning. (I exaggerate
> perhaps, but the point is valid.)
>
> We've talked more than once about offering multiple alternative
> starting-point postgresql.conf files to give people an idea of what to
> do for small/medium/large installations. MySQL have done that for years
> and it doesn't seem that users are unable to cope with the concept.
> But doing this is (a) mostly a matter of testing and documenting, not
> coding and (b) probably too small for a SoC project anyway.

My recollection was that there was opposition to offering multiple
config files, but that there was a proposal to make initdb smarter about
picking configuration values.

Personally, I agree that multiple config files would be fine. Or a
really fancy solution would be feeding a config option to initdb and
have it generate an appropriate postgresql.conf.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
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