Re: [GENERAL] Future of PostgreSQL

Hi,

Yes, I think reliability needs more work. I've had quite a few problems with
system indexes getting corrupted (number of tuples incorrect and some other
bizarre problems). Very hard to pin down as I haven't been able to reproduce any
of these cases. I've got the feeling that there may be problems when you have PL
routines used to enforce consistency constraints between several tables and the
database is being hit hard.

On the whole we are very happy with postgres and it has recently moved from one
of our development systems to a production system.

I think there has been a similar development for quite a few other people and
there are an increasing number of production Postgres systems out there. Several
people have mentioned that they could make some money available for futher
development of postgres. I also noticed that the common list of complaints (large
tuples etc) have mostly moved from the to-do to the done list.

I think there needs to be a new discussion on how best to make use of additional
resources to do things that benefit postgres most. Perhaps it would be an idea to
have the developers put together a list with tasks that are boring and that
nobody wants to do, but that would be of great benefit to the system (for
somebody who doesn't know the internals it is hard to see what may be important
tasks).

I would prefer to contribute time, but we are kind-of short of people, so that
that is pretty hard to do. The next best thing then seems to be to contribute
money in a way that benefits everybody. I'm thinking along the lines of: if a
few companies could provide $500 or $1000 and this could free up some of a
developers time to work on postgres rather than to go contracting and this time
is spent on a part of postgres that is important for production use (Vadim's work
on the transaction logs for example), then this is a good thing.

Any such process should make use of an accumulation of small contributions, as it
is amazingly difficult to explain to a finance director why you want to spend
$1000 without getting anything solid in return (while they are often quite happy
to shell out twice that for an Office licence) and many companies are small
start-ups and perhaps not that flush with cash (which is probably why they are
using postgres in the first place).

And secondly it is very important for the developers to figure out how this is
going to interact with the whole process of collaborative software development.
The last thing we want is competition for funds to impact on a collaborative
development process. I think a system like this can only operate if it is based
on consensus between the main developers.

Please feel free to flame if I'm talking bollox. In the mean-time: happy new year
to everybody!

Adriaan