A powerful feature for easier error finding

From: David Andersen <mrdavidandersen(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: A powerful feature for easier error finding
Date: 2009-07-19 14:14:18
Message-ID: c6bf5b380907190714n3b943aadj32e48867b9bfbc22@mail.gmail.com
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My scenario was the following. I got the following error message:
postgres=# create trusted language plpythonu;
ERROR: could not load library "C:/Program
Files/PostgreSQL/lib/plpython.dll": unknown error 126

I had Python 3.1 installed and I did not know that PostgreSQL does not
support this. The time it took to figure this out was around a quarter of an
hour, epecially since a search for "error 126" did not yield any results.

My proposal is to somehow convert ANY error message into a url. This url
should be to a WIki page where one could get help regarding the error
message. In the case above the url COULD be:
postgres=# create trusted language plpythonu;
ERROR: could not load library "C:/Program
Files/PostgreSQL/lib/plpython.dll": unknown error 126
Wiki help on error:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Error:_plpython.dll_error_126#8.4

The conversion method is, of course, critical and I am sure someone else has
better ideas regarding this. The url could also include parts of the
statement leading to the error message (in my case "plpythonu").

One really nice side effect of this that if one could count the number of
page visits on each wikipage, one would get a nice estimate on which error
messages cause the most trouble for the users (users would not go to the
wiki to research obvious error messages). The #8.4 part of the url means
that this statistic could be generated for each version of PostgreSQL.

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