Re: Hard to Use WAS: Hard limit on WAL space

On 06/12/2013 02:03 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> What concerns me is we seem to be trying to make this "easy". It isn't
> supposed to be easy. This is hard stuff. Smart people built it and it
> takes a smart person to run it. When did it become a bad thing to be
> something that smart people need to run?

1997, last I checked.

Our unofficial motto: "PostgreSQL: making very hard things possible, and
simple things hard."

It *is* hard. But that's because we've *made* it hard to understand and
manage, not because the problem is inherently hard. For example: can
you explain to me in 10 words or less how to monitor to see if archiving
is falling behind? I'll bet you can't, and that's because we've
provided no reliable way to do so.

It's normal when you're developing features for the ability to utilize
them to go from hacker --> high-end user --> regular user. We suck at
moving to that last stage, partly because whenever someone on this list
introduces the idea of making a feature not just great but easy to use,
people actually object to the idea that anything should be easy to use.
It's like we're afraid of being polluted by the unwashed DevOps masses.

In the meantime, Mongo kicks our butts a new user adoption. Why? Their
features suck, but the features they do have are easy to use. You'd
think we would have learned something from MySQL.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com