Re: [HACKERS] Help a newbie?

Rafael Kaufmann <rnedal@olimpo.com.br> writes:
> technological mainstream) and I've been trying to learn more about the
> PostgreSQL internals, maybe even help with its development. So I
> downloaded the source tarball for the last release.

Actually, I'd recommend working from a recent snapshot --- there's been
many changes and improvements since 6.4.2.

> So I'd really appreciate it if anyone would point me in the
> direction of some in-depth docos, detailed texts about the Postgres
> architecture or anything else that would help me get started hacking.

There is a fair amount of stuff in the Administrator's Guide,
Programmer's Guide, and Developer's Guide parts of the manual.
It won't all make sense on first reading, but I'd certainly recommend
reading those parts of the manual thoroughly.

There are also useful bits of documentation buried in less-obvious
places, such as the backend flowchart in src/tools/backend/flow.jpg
and the README files found in many of the sourcecode directories.

One thing to watch out for is that not all of the doco is up to date
:-(.  Checking the source code is always the most reliable guide to
How It Really Works.

A really useful trick is to set up a full-text index of the source tree
(I use 'glimpse' from http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/) so that you can
easily find all the uses of a particular routine, look for the place
where a particular error message is generated, etc.

If you want to delve into the actual database algorithms then you should
have one of the standard database textbooks at hand (anyone care to
recommend some titles?).

If you've got specific questions about where to look for particular
functions, feel free to ask ... 

Welcome aboard!
        regards, tom lane