Re: 2018-03 Commitfest Summary (Andres #1)

On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 1:47 AM, Fabien COELHO <coelho(at)cri(dot)ensmp(dot)fr> wrote:
> On the "adequate return" point, my opinion is that currently pgbench is just
> below the feature set needed to be generally usable, so not improving it is
> a self-fullfilling ensurance that it will not be used further. Once the
> "right" feature set is reached (for me, at least extracting query output
> into variables, having conditionals, possibly a few more functions if some
> benches use them), whether it would be actually more widely used by both
> developers and users is an open question.

FWIW, I think that pgbench would become a lot more usable if someone
maintained a toolset for managing pgbench. Something similar to Greg
Smith's pgbench-tools project, but with additional features for
instrumenting the server. There would be a lot of value in integrating
it with third party tooling, such as perf and BCC, and in making it
easy for non-experts to run relevant, representative tests.

Things like the rate limiting and alternative distributions were
sorely needed, but there are diminishing returns. It's pretty clear to
me that much of the remaining low hanging fruit is outside of pgbench
itself. None of the more recent pgbench enhancements seem to make it
easier to use.

--
Peter Geoghegan