Re: pgAgent STDERR and Time Zone Questions

On Dec 19, 2011, at 1:51 AM, Dave Page wrote:

> All of the internal logging goes to the file if specified, or stdout,
> with the exception of a couple of serious errors, like "failed to open
> the logfile". wxWidgets might be writing some of it's own logging
> output to stderr though I guess.

No, I mean that STDERR output from my batch scripts does not appear to be logged anywhere. Is there any way for pgadmin to capture output from batch scripts and log it somewhere, or do they need to do their own logging?

Would be handy for such output to appear somewhere in the job history…

>> • When scheduling execution times in pgAdmin, what time zone does it use?
>
> It doesn't, as you don't typically specify absolute dates in schedule
> (except sometimes for exceptions and
> start/end dates - then it'll default to whatever the connection will use)
>
>> And what time zone does pgagent use to determine when it's time to run a job?
>
> Whatever the default is for the client that causes the execution time
> to be recalculated.
>
> In truth though, when this was originally written I don't think anyone
> really considered different timezones. Patches are welcome if you want
> to improve.

Yes, because consider this: if I schedule a job for 1:06 am pgAdmin on my laptop, which is running under America/Los_Angeles, PostgreSQL is running with time zone to UTC, and the system where pgadmin is running is on America/New_York, at which of these times will it execute?

a. 1:06 UTC
b. 1:06 America/New_York
c. 1:06 America/Los_Angeles

From what you’re telling me, it sounds like the answer is b. If so, I think it might be sufficient for the UI to say something like “Jobs will be run at the specified time(s) in the time zone under which the client (pgagent) runs.

>> And on a side note: What are the chance the pgAgent daemon could be modified so that it does not use the wx library. Seems kind of silly to include a GUI library in a daemon, though I don’t doubt that it makes windows compatibility easier.
>
> wxWidgets isn't just a GUI library - it consists of various individual
> libraries offering different features, some of which are GUI related,
> and some are not. pgAgent doesn't use any of the GUI ones, so there's
> no requirement to install any GUI components on your server (unless
> your chosen packaging for wxWidgets doesn't separate the GUI and
> non-GUI parts of course).

Okay. Pity it’s not 64-bit yet, though.

Best,

David