Re: [HACKERS] Happy column dropping

At 12:48 AM 1/25/00 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>On 2000-01-23, Don Baccus mentioned:
>
>> I certainly don't want to discourage Peter, either, and perhaps
>> was a bit too harsh. But release of a feature this half-baked
>> would fit the stereotype many people have held towards free,
>> open source software, and postgres in particular.
>
>Who said something of a release? Whatever happened to release early,
>release often?

Is "release early, release often" why RH 6.1 doesn't seem to recognize
memory > 64 MB on a wide variety of x86 systems, the exact same boxes
on which RH 6.0 properly detected memory? (kernel 2.2.*)

Sometimes I wonder...it leaves the impression that RH 6.1 left the house
with little QA testing.

I was unaware that other folks had pointed to the copy/rename approach
earlier as being a possible means of implementation. I thought you'd
pulled that one out of your hat. Still, more advance discussion would've
perhaps led to other approaches to investigate, just as discussion
now is doing.

I'm going to be blunt: implementation of "drop column" by doing a copy/rename
isn't something one expects of a competitive commercial-quality RDBMS.

Perhaps it's the best we can expect of Postgres, though. If so, so be it.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza(at)pacifier(dot)com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest
Rare Bird Alert Service and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net.