Re: State of Beta 2

Tom Lane wrote:
> Dunno about MySQL.  I'm pretty sure I remember Ann Harrison stating that
> FireBird's disk structures haven't changed since the beginning of
> Interbase.  Which you might take as saying that they were a lot smarter
> than we are, but I suspect what it really means is that
> FireBird/Interbase hasn't undergone the kind of metamorphosis of purpose
> that the Postgres code base has.  Keep in mind that it started as an
> experimental academic prototype (representing some successful ideas and
> some not-so-successful ones), and the current developers have been
> laboring to convert it into an industrial-strength production tool ---
> keeping the good experimental ideas, but weeding out the bad ones, and
> adding production-oriented features that weren't in the original design.
> The entire argument that version-to-version stability should be a
> critical goal would have been foreign to the original developers of
> Postgres.

Thought the fact PostgreSQL came from an academic world are part of it,
the big reason we change on-disk format so often is that we are
improving faster than any other database on the planet.

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