RE: [HACKERS] OSDN Database conference report (long)

Hi all,

I'm one of the accidentally-subscribed readers to the Hackers list. I
mainly wanted to thank Tom for typing this up. I had a great time reading
it and learned a lot. I also wanted to try and help with some personal
experience since God knows I wouldn't be able to code in C or whatever PG is
in ;)

> database to do error checking. I thought this pointed up the need we've
> been aware of for awhile to overhaul our error reporting. Tim also had
> a "wish list" for PG that included better admin tools, such as a way to
> see exactly what queries are running; and a way to retrieve all the
> database-generated items in a just-inserted row, not only the OID.
> Both of these have also been on the radar screen for awhile.

I'm not sure exactly where the error checking comes in. I've been using
Postgres in two places - at home (Apache/Tomcat) and at work (Apache/iASP)
for the last 8 months or so. The only gripe I have with error messages is
that they could be more specific. "Error near <some character that occurs
20+ times in the query>" is usually pretty useless =) Otherwise, I can't
recall a single time where I said, "man that message should be more clear".

Then again, I'm positive I'm not the hardcore DB-user that lots of Oracle
DBAs are, or most all of you! In your collective journeys, I'm sure there
are some other ~bad ones, or else Tom wouldn't have mentioned that. Just
wanted to say in my xp, nothing bad to say.

> We have to be sure that Joe Average Unix Sysadmin can deal with our
> servers without much trouble.

I'm much less competant than your Joe Six-pack *nix admin. Hell, I probably
even spelled competant wrong. I downloaded, compiled, and installed PG in
no time flat. I was querying via JSP less than 30 minutes after I
downloaded the database. However, I've never really done anything past
that. Would I be considered your 'typical' PG user? Dunno... I've written
a lot of little apps that use Postgres, but it's all your routine stuff.
Some INSERTs, some SELECTs, etc. Nothing mind-blowing, that's for sure. I
don't use any of the management tools, never any need to. Although, I have
made several mental-notes to figure out just where the "Object" stuff comes
into place w.r.t. "Object-Relational" tho' =)

I wish I could offer some better feedback, but from my point of view,
Postgres has been great. Never crashed, takes up pretty much no system
resources, great docs, etc.

Keep up the great work guys! There are countless people appreciating it
every single day that you'll never hear from. Not my boss for sure. That
guy's unorganized as hell. Good guy, but you'd never get a thanks from him
;) Mental note: make sure Dave doesn't read pgsql-hackers.

Take care!

- r