Re: Pg default's verbosity?

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr> wrote:
>> The argument for defaulting to NOTICE is the same as it's always been:
>> that those messages are really intended for novices, and a pretty good
>> definition of a novice is somebody who doesn't know how to (or that he
>> should) change the verbosity setting.  So if we don't show notices by
>> default, they will be unavailable to exactly the people who need them.
>> Your proposal does not overcome this argument.
>
> I'm sceptical about what a real "novice" is expected to do about the
> incredible flow of useless information displayed when loading a significant
> script. For a start, s?he should be an incredibly fast reader:-)
>
> For a non-novice it just hides what is important and should be seen.

There might be something to the idea of demoting a few of the things
we've traditionally had as NOTICEs, though. IME, the following two
messages account for a huge percentage of the chatter:

NOTICE: CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "foo_a_seq" for
serial column "foo.a"
NOTICE: CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index
"foo_pkey" for table "foo"

I'm not going to claim that nobody in the history of the world has
ever benefited from those notices ... but I would be willing to bet
that a large majority of the people, in a large majority of the cases,
do not care. And getting rid of them would surely make warnings and
notices that might actually be of interest to the user a lot more
visible.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company