Re: Pet Peeves?

Gregory Stark wrote:
> I'm putting together a talk on "PostgreSQL Pet Peeves" for discussion at
> FOSDEM 2009 this year. I have a pretty good idea what some them are of course,
> but I would be interested to hear if people have any complaints from personal
> experience. What would be most interesting is if you can explain an example of
> when the problem caused real inconvenience to you, since sometimes it's hard
> to see from a theoretical description where the real harm lies.
>
> So, what do people say? Is Postgres perfect in your world or does it do some
> things which rub you the wrong way?
>
> Feel free to respond on-list or if you prefer in personal emails. I do intend
> to use the ideas you give in my presentation so mark anything you wouldn't be
> happy to see in a slide at a conference some day.
>

Back in March 2005, I started an email thread titled "Debugging
deadlocks". Most of the experienced PGers participated in that thread.
The basic issue at that time was that inserting a row into a table
with a foreign key placed an exclusive row-level lock (SELECT FOR
UPDATE) on the reference table (the table to which the foreign key
refers). If you happen to do inserts on two different tables, each with
a foreign key to the same reference table, deadlocks are pretty easy to
create. This is especially true if the reference table has low
cardinality, which is often the case.

I don't know if this situation has been improved since that time.

--
Guy Rouillier