Re: For the ametures. (related to "Are we losing momentum?")

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Clewett [mailto:B.Clewett@roadrunner.uk.com]
> Sent: 17 April 2003 12:44
> To: Dave Page; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] For the ametures. (related to "Are we
> losing momentum?")
>
>
>
> But not the API's.  Not in one central location.  Some of it,
> the stuff
> I use, is on GBorg,

The API's that ship with the source (libpq et al.) are all documented in
the HTML docs that ship with the code as far as I'm aware.

I suspect what you look at on Gborg will be one or more of psqlODBC,
Npgsql or libpqxx? These are seperate projects, and hence have their own
documentation. I don't know about libpqxx, but the psqlODBC docs are
very old I admit. If anyone cares to work on them, please let me know.
The Npgsql stuff is all very new and very alpha and I guess of all the
Npgsql hackers, I'm probably the only one who hangs around here - that's
how seperate the project is from PostgreSQL itself.

What we could probably use is a page on the main website highlighting
all the programming interfaces - similar to
http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/interfaces.html but a bit more
prominent and focused. I'll put my third hat on now and repeat - if
anyone cares to work on this, please let me know :-)

> My personal 'gripe' was when reading through the postings,
> some people
> considered people who have not the time, patience or ability,
> to learn
> PostgreSQL completelly, somehow not worthy.
>
> I wanted to support us dumb users! :)

That's certainly not the case for many of the people here, though you
must remember, the vast majority of us work voluntarily and prefer to
help users who have made an effort to help themselves first rather than
those who expect us to do everything for them for free. Thankfully those
people are few and far between, but they do crop up from time to time.

> > PostgreSQL is by no means alone in this requirement. SQL Server for
> > example has 'optimizations' that are performed usually as part of a
> > scheduled maintenance plan and are analagous to vacuum in some ways.
>
> Is this a weekness in DBMS's that don't require this?  (MySQL, Liant
> etc.)  Is there a way of building a guarbage collector into
> the system?

Potentially I guess, if they are cleaning up and trying to reuse space
on the fly then they could suffer a performance hit.

> My Windows PC has no 'cron'.

No, but it probably has a Scheduled Tasks folder unless it's a really
old version.

>
> Can this command can be used, with users in the system making heavy
> changes, and when takes many hours to complete, does produce
> a valid and
> consistent backup?

Yes, pg_dump will give you a consistent backup - this is from section
9.1 of the Administrators Guide in the Backup and Restore section:

Dumps created by pg_dump are internally consistent, that is, updates to
the database while pg_dump is running will not be in the dump. pg_dump
does not block other operations on the database while it is working.
(Exceptions are those operations that need to operate with an exclusive
lock, such as VACUUM FULL.)

Regards, Dave.